Greg Pavlik

Cloud commentary

2011-12-21T17:41:00.000-08:00

Bruce Tierney from Oracle covered my cloud talk at Gartner's application architecture conference a few weeks back - he highlights some points I think are important.

Gartner

2011-11-29T07:00:00.000-08:00

Speaking tomorrow at Gartner's Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit on cloud computing and integration in Vegas at 9:45am: if you are there, please stop by to talk.

WESOA 2011 CFP - Cyprus!

2011-07-07T13:49:00.000-07:00

Have again this year happily agreed to work the program committee for wesoa, the always useful workshop attached to icsoc. This year, wesoa will be in Cyprus, which should make my attendance a bit more challenging than last year's event in San Francisco...

CALL FOR PAPERS

WESOA 2011

7th INT. WORKSHOP ON ENGINEERING SERVICE ORIENTED APPLICATIONS

Associated with ICSOC 2011
Dec. 5th 2011, Paphos, Cyprus
http://www.wesoa.org/

Paper Submission Due: September 15th 2011

OBJECTIVES
==========

Many of today's large-scale software projects in the area of distributed
systems and especially enterprise IT adopt service-oriented software
architecture design patterns and enabling technologies. For these
projects, availability of sound software engineering principles,
methodology and tool support is of utmost importance. However,
traditional software engineering approaches are not fully appropriate
for the development of service-oriented applications. The limitations of
traditional methods in the context of service-oriented computing have
led to the emergence of Software Service Engineering (SSE) as a
specialist discipline, but research in this area is still ongoing and
many open issues remain. There is a need for research community and
industry practitioners to develop comprehensive engineering principles,
methodologies and tool support for the entire software development
lifecycle (SDLC) for service-oriented applications. The WESOA 2011
workshop is the seventh in a series of workshops that focus on the
specific aspects of SSE.

The theme of this edition of the WESOA workshop, aligned with the ICSOC
2011 focus on Cloud Computing, is exploration of the synergies between
SSE, Cloud Computing and Service Mashups. In particular, with the lack
of concrete SSE methodologies and approaches the future focus of
combining SSE, Cloud Computing and Service Mashups is as exciting as it
is potentially dangerous. There are risks of providing end-users with
powerful compositional tools to create new service-based applications
without rigorous engineering control mechanisms. This area provides a
strong candidate for future research for quality assurance in SSE. We
especially encourage papers that address the combination of these topic
areas.

Our aim is to facilitate exchange and evolution of ideas on SSE topics
across multiple disciplines as well as to encourage participation of
both researchers and practitioners from academia and industry. In
particular, such collaboration shall be fostered by means of a highly
interactive and fast-paced workshop format with invited speakers. We
also intend to hold a discussion panel on the theme of the workshop to
encourage ideas for future research.

GENERAL TOPICS
==============

WESOA 2011 encourages a multidisciplinary perspective and welcomes
papers that address general or domain-specific challenges of SSE.
Workshop topics of interest include, but are not limited to the
following:

- Software service development lifecycle methodologies & processes
- Distributed & collaborative software service development
- Service-oriented reference models & frameworks
- Architectural styles & standards for software service systems
- Management & governance of SSE projects
- Models, languages, methods for service-oriented analysis & design
- Costing, valuation & quality metrics of software service design
- Requirements-engineering for software service systems
- Service-oriented business process modeling & management
- SSE for cloud computing environments (incl. IaaS, PaaS & SaaS)
- Validation, verification & testing of software service systems
- Service assembly, composition and aggregation models & languages
- Model-driven SOA & service systems development
- Reverse engineering of software service systems
- Tool support for software service engineering
- Case studies & best practices of service-oriented development
- SEE for context-awareness & mobile devices

IMPORTANT DATES
===============

- Paper Submission Due: September 15th, 2011
- Notification of Acceptance: October 23th, 2011
- Camera-Ready Copy Due: about November 7th, 2011
- Workshop Date: December 5th, 2011

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
=======================

Authors are invited to submit original, previously unpublished research
papers. Papers should be written in English and must not exceed 10
pages, strictly following Springer LNCS style including all text,
references, appendices, and figures. Please, submit papers via the WESOA
conference management tool (see WESOA website) in PDF format. For
formatting instructions and templates see the Springer Web page:

http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html

All submissions will be peer-reviewed by members of the international
program committee. Paper acceptance will be based on originality,
significance, technical soundness, and clarity of presentation. Accepted
papers will be included in the workshop proceedings, and circulated to
participants prior to the event. Workshop proceedings will be published
by Springer-Verlag (under negotiation).

At least one author of an accepted paper must register and participate
in the workshop. Registration is subject to the terms, conditions and
procedure of the main ICSOC conference to be found on their website:
http://www.icsoc.org/

ORGANISING COMMITTEE
====================

- George Feuerlicht, Prague University of Economics, CZ
- Winfried Lamersdorf, University of Hamburg, DE
- Guadalupe Ortiz, University of Extremadura, ES
- Christian Zirpins, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, DE

- Invited PC Chair: Howard Foster, City University London, GB

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE (to be confirmed)
===================

- Sudhir Agarwal, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, DE
- Marco Aiello, University of Groningen, NL
- Djamal Benslimane, LIRIS, FR
- Sami Bhiri, DERI Galway, IE
- Alena Buchalcevova, Prague University of Economics, CZ
- Robert Castaneda, CustomWare, AU
- AnisCharfi, SAP Research CEC Darmstadt, DE
- Jen-Yao Chung, IBM T.J. Watson Research, US
- Oscar Corcho, University of Manchester, GB
- Vincenzo D'andrea, University of Trento, IT
- Florian Daniel, University of Trento, IT
- Valeria de Castro, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, ES
- Keith Duddy, Queensland University of Technology, AU
- Schahram Dustdar, Technical University of Vienna, AT
- Paul Greenfield, CSIRO, AU
- Birgit Hofreiter, Hochschule Lichtenstein, LI
- Dimka Karastoyanova, University of Stuttgart, DE
- Rannia Khalaf, IBM watson Research, US
- Agnes Koschmieder, University of Karlsruhe, DE
- Mark Little, Red Hat, UK
- E. Michael Maximilien, IBM Almaden Research, US
- Massimo Mecella, Univ. Roma LA SAPIENZA, IT
- Daniel Moldt, University of Hamburg, DE
- Rebecca Parsons, ThoughtWorks, US
- CesarePautasso, Universitz of Lugano, CH
- Greg Pavlik, Oracle, US
- Pierluigi Plebani, Politecnico di Milano, I
- Franco Raimondi, University College London, GB
- Wolfgang Reisig, Humboldt-University Berlin, DE
- Norbert Ritter, University of Hamburg, DE
- Colette Rolland, University of Paris, FR
- Willem-Jan van den Heuvel, Tilburg University, NL
- Jim Webber, ThoughtWorks, AU
- Olaf Zimmermann, IBM Research Zrich, CH

If you have further queries please email to the workshop chairs on:
chairs wesoa.org

Japanese Disaster Aid

2011-03-13T18:37:00.001-07:00

Latest from the New York Times.

Please consider giving relief aid to Japan for the worst disaster since the second world war. Appended is a list of relief agencies accepting donations for Japanese relief work compiled by the Associated Press:

U.S. organizations accepting donations to assist Japan included:

Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA)

Donations: 800-424-ADRA (2372)

Donations address: ADRA International, 12501 Old Columbia Pike, Silver Spring MD 20904

Website: http://www.adra.org

All Hands Volunteers

Donations: 919-830-3573

Donations address: PO Box 546, Carlisle MA 01741

Website: http://www.hands.org/donate/japan-tsunami

American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

Donations: 212-687-6200

Donations address: 132 E. 43rd St PO Box 530, New York NY 10017

Website: http://jdc.org

American Red Cross

Donations: 1-800-RED-CROSS

Donations address: PO Box 37243, Washington DC 20013

Website: http://www.redcross.org

AmeriCares

Donations: 203-658-9500

Donations address: 88 Hamilton Ave, Stamford CT 06902

Website: http://americares.org

Ananda Marga Universal Relief Team (AMURT)

Donations: 301-738-7122

Donations address: AMURT, 2502 Lindley Ter, Rockville MD 20850

Website: http://amurt.us

Baptist World Alliance/Baptist World Aid

Donations: 703-790-8980

Donations address: 405 N. Washington St, Falls Church VA 22046

Website: http://www.bwanet.org

Brother's Brother Foundation

Donations: 412-321-3160

Donations address: 1200 Galveston Ave, Pittsburgh PA 15233

Website: http://brothersbrother.org

Buddhist Tzu Chi Foundation

Donations: 1-888-989-8244

Donations address: Tzu Chi USA HQ, 1100 S Valley Center Ave, San Dimas CA 91773

Website: http://www.us.tzuchi.org/usa/home.nsf/other/donateCharity

Catholic Relief Services

Donations: 1-877-HELP-CRS

Donations address: PO Box 17090, Baltimore MD 21203-7090

Website: http://crs.org

Christian Reformed World Relief Committee

Donations: 800-55-CRWRC

Donations address: CRWRC, 2850 Kalamazoo Ave SE, Grand Rapids MI 49560-0600

Website: http://www.crwrc.org

Church World Service

Donations: 1-800-297-1516

Donations address: PO Box 968, Elkhart IN 46515

Website: http://www.churchworldservice.org

Direct Relief International

Donations: 805-964-4767

Donations address: 27 S. La Patera Ln, Santa Barbara CA 93117

Website: http://www.DirectRelief.org

Giving Children Hope

Donations: 714-523-4454

Donations address: 8332 Commonwealth Ave, Buena Park CA 90621

Website: http://gchope.org

Habitat for Humanity International

Donations: 1-800-Habitat

Donations address: 270 Peachtree St NW Suite 1300, Atlanta GA 30303-1263

Website: http://habitat.org

International Medical Corps

Donations: 800-481-4462

Donations address: 1919 Santa Monica Blvd Suite 400, Santa Monica CA 90404

Website: http://internationalmedicalcorps.org

International Rescue Committee

Donations: 1-877-REFUGEE (733-8433)

Donations address: 122 E. 42nd St, New York NY 10168

Website: http://www.rescue.org

Mercy Corps

Donations: 800-852-2100

Donations address: Dept. NR, PO Box 2669, Portland OR 97208

Website: https://www.mercycorps.org/donate/japan

Operation Blessing

Donations: 800-730-2537

Donations address: 977 Centerville Tpke, Virginia Beach VA 23463

Website: http://www.operationblessing.org

Relief International

Donations: 310-478-1200

Donations address: 5455 Wilshire Blvd Suite 1280, Los Angeles CA 90036

Website: http://www.ri.org

Save the Children

Donations: 1-800-728-3843

Donations address: 54 Wilton Rd, Westport CT 06880

Website: http://savethechildren.org

World Vision, U.S.

Donations: 1-800-777-5777

Donations address: Federal Way, WA 98063

Website: http://www.worldvision.org

Source: InterAction, www.interaction.org

I'll note also IOCC, who we've had personal contact with and know their work is reliable:

Website: http://www.iocc.org

Money for nothing

2011-01-30T11:50:00.000-08:00

A few years back I participated in a study on early stage investing in Russia - motivated by the fact that there is a lot of money staged by both the Russian government and Russian investors. What's become even more intriguing since then is the flow of Russian money to Silicon Valley investments - DST-Facebook investments getting the most attention recently. These high value deals are definitely bold and working - for now.

The latest news is the super cheap angel funding that Yuri Milner is engineering. Whether this is sustainable long term is hard to say, but this will surely shake things up around here for the foreseeable future. One thing is certain: the already hot startup environment just got a lot hotter.

Feedly: the iPhone just got a lot better

2011-01-30T11:37:00.000-08:00

For several years, I've been using Feedly on my personal computer to quickly browse across lots of content from news feeds, blogs, and other sites of interest. It's been a very handy way to keep up on information from lots of sources without getting bogged down - scan lots of feed titles and previews and dive in on items that seem interesting.

But my usage patterns with Feedly have been uneven - primarily because I don't have much time to sit and scan on my pc - I'm either doing meetings, working on documents or trying to stay on top of email during the day. My "dead time" tends to be "in between" times like running between office buildings. That's when I'll check news feeds to see what's going on in industry or the world. Typically, it means manually browsing to reliable sites - which is not all that convenient.

Well, now Feedly is available on the iPhone and things just got a lot better for me. I can manage all my feeds through the desktop, but take advantage of very quickly scanning information over hundreds of sources. It's now virtually the only iPhone app that I use regularly and I don't lose any time. In fact, since I've been playing with it, I really haven't needed to open Safari at all. My only "wish" for Feedly is that the digest would show the latest feed entry for each source by title, which would save me some wasted navigation. For me, this is all about getting the right information to me quickly.

A seriously great app that bridges all my normal working environments seamlessly. Highly recommended - thanks Edwin and company for pulling this off!

WESOA 2010 - SF December 7th

2010-11-29T08:50:00.000-08:00

This year, both the International Conference on Service Oriented Computing and the long running companion Workshop on Engineering Service Oriented Applications will be in San Francisco. I have had a long involvement with both as a program committee member, presenter and author and have always found them to be valuable as an attendee. I am particularly pleased this year that the program is in the bay area, as it is bound to bring out some very smart and very "plugged in" participants from the vendor community.

In any case, I'll be delivering the keynote presentation for the WESOA conference, so please stop by if you are there. I have not been able to attend in person since Amsterdam, so this will be a real pleasure and I hope to see you there.

Oracle SOA 11g Books

2010-11-19T21:37:00.000-08:00

I'm impressed: a list of books that have been published for users of Oracle SOA and BPM portfolio products. I'm very proud to know many of the authors as friends and most of the developers.

Getting Started with Oracle SOA Suite 11g - A Hands on Tutorial

Oracle SOA 11g Handbook

Oracle SOA Suite 11g Developers Guide

The Definitive Guide to SOA Oracle Service Bus

WS-BPEL 2.0 for SOA Composite Applications with Oracle SOA Suite 11g

Getting Started with Oracle BPM Suite 11g - A Hands on Tutorial

OpenWorld Focus on SOA

2010-09-19T10:34:00.000-07:00

Hope to see many long time and new friends and colleagues at Open World and JavaOne this year. Take a look at the Focus on SOA document to get oriented this year.

Warming Trends: a taste of things to come?

2010-08-02T06:54:00.001-07:00

While I was in Moscow a few weeks back, the temperatures were stably higher than anything ever experienced in the history of record keeping: temperatures were literally unbearable. Traveling to India after that - where temperatures were thankfully cooler - I was impressed by exactly how difficult it will be for any country including more recently developed countries to put the brakes on the rate of increase of consumption of fossil fuels.

This brief news article describing the temperature trends and fires in Russia as a result of climate change is worth reading in its entirety. It does not do justice to the fires themselves and the havoc they are wreaking. A taste of things to come?

"Meteorologists say air temperature in central Russia by Friday might reach 41 degrees Celsius, which is likely to cause more forest fires in the region.

The recent sporadic rains in central Russian regions have not been brought by a cold weather front, so there is no hope for the drop of air temperatures, an official from the Russian meteorological service said yesterday.

“On the contrary, we expect that air temperature will go up to 41 degrees Celsius by Friday,” he added.

He also said that according to Internet-modelled forecasts, the weather might change after August 8, although such forecasts cannot be fully trusted. “The possibility of an error considerably increases starting from the forecast’s fifth day, so its accuracy nears zero by the eights day,” he said and once again confirmed that short-term forecasts testify to hot weather.

Meteorologists also say the winds are likely to change direction from south-eastern to south-western, thus bringing Mediterranean rains. Moreover, thanks to such winds smoke from peat-bog fires will go to less populated areas.

Meanwhile, according to the Russian Emergencies Ministry, a total of 227 wildfires were registered in central Russian regions in the past 24 hours. The bulk of fires, 130, were registered in the Moscow region, 48 was the tally in the Vladimir region, 9 in the Voronezh region, and another 9 in the Ryazan region. The total area hit by wildfires is 11,038 hectares. "

Source: The Hindu

ICSOC 2010

2010-06-21T05:58:00.000-07:00

Just a brief note to remind people that the International Conference on Service Oriented Computing will be in the San Francisco Bay Area this year. I have for a long time worked with ICSOC - as a program committee member on the industrial track, in several workshops, panels and papers. It is the best conference combining industry and academic participants on the topic of service orientation in my opinion.

Russian Tech Center

2010-06-07T08:24:00.001-07:00

More on the efforts to draw outside capital and pull back talent in the developing technical center outside Moscow, covered by the NY Times. I'm thinking that President Medvedev is a bit over-optimistic about the influence of word of mouth here...

A recap meeting on the American VC trip spotlighted in the Times article will be held this week in Palo Alto. Details linked.

Taterware

2010-06-07T08:17:00.000-07:00

Another great green idea: disposable utensils made from potato starch and limestone. Breaks down in 60-90 days. They are using them at Oracle HQ cafeterias - I'm going to have to drop in and see how they perform.

One reason Exadata is so cool

2010-06-02T08:25:00.000-07:00

Flash cache. This video barely scratches the surface, but Exadata is one of the best examples of hardware-meets-software done right.

Andrei Voznesensky, RIP

2010-06-02T08:00:00.001-07:00

The Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky has just reposed. I always feel a special loss when we lose a poet of quality - the ability to speak to the human condition (not to say to understand it) is a remarkably rare thing, that requires the language of metaphor and analogy rather than forceful syllogisms. This is why poets are the only people that can provide us relief and protection from scientists, politicians and economists - the classes that I am a part of and that so often despise our humanity. Somehow this contrast was sharpened rather than lost in the revolution - I am thinking of many writers now, not just (or primarily) of Voznesensky.

One evening this week, I will try my hand at translating я Гойя ("I am Goya") and post the results, with apologies in advance for the damage I do. I may intersperse the phonetic Russian to give a feel for the force of the poem.

250 Million US PE in Skolkovo

2010-06-01T07:27:00.000-07:00

Interesting play from Sigular Guff and Company - the deal centers on infrastructure and services for what will surely be an area with a high level of investment for IT.

Larry on Oracle+Sun

2010-05-13T12:32:00.000-07:00

Gotta love the candor.

Brazilian growth outpacing India and China

2010-05-11T10:44:00.001-07:00

For those in the Bay Area whose economic radar hasn't been working of late, Brazil's economy, the largest in South America, expanded by 10 percent in the first quarter of 2010, outpacing China and India. Click through to read the whole piece.

Oracle BPM 11gR1

2010-04-28T09:09:00.001-07:00

April 27th marked the release of the Oracle BPM platform, which is, I believe, a bit more revolutionary than evolutionary for this space. I wanted to quickly copy some feedback from one of our partners (Hajo Normann - a SOA expert and ACE director - to give a feel for exactly what is differentiating about this product:

"“I just attended a preview workshop on BPM Studio, Oracle's BPMN 2.0 tool, held by Clemens Utschig Utschig from Oracle HQ. The usability and ease to get started are impressive. In the business view analysts can intuitively start modeling, then developers refine in their own, more technical view. The BPM Studio sets itself apart from pure play BPMN 2.0 tools by being seamlessly integrated inside a holistic SOA / BPM toolset: BPMN models are placed in SCA-Composites in SOA Suite 11g. This allows to abstract away the complexities of SOA integration aspects from business process aspects. For UIs in BPMN tasks, you have the richness of ADF 11g based Frontends. With BPM Studio we architects have a new modeling and development IDE that gives us interesting design challenges to grasp and elaborate, since many things BPMN 2.0 are different from good ol' BPEL. For example, for simple transformations, you don't use BPEL "assign" any more, but add the transformation directly to the service call. There is much less XPath involved. And, there is no translation from model to BPEL code anymore, so the awkward process model to BPEL roundtrip, which never really worked as well as it looked on marketing slides, is obsolete: With BPMN 2.0 "the model is the code". Now, these are great times to start the journey into BPM! Some tips: Start Projects smoothly, with initial processes being not overly complex and not using the more esoteric areas of BPMN, to manage the learning path and to stay successful with each iteration. Verify non functional requirements by conducting performance and load tests early. As mentioned above, separate all technical integration logic into SOA Suite or Oracle Service Bus. And - share your experience!” "

The eternal problem with BPM has been the disconnect between business-user ease of use and the technological bridge to interface with real systems. Oracle's new BPM release starts to remove this barrier and is in many ways the first product set in the market to provide a truly integrated system for automating core business processes across human-centered workflows and IT systems.

JavaOne Call for Papers open

2010-02-12T12:42:00.001-08:00

This year should be one of the most interesting in a decade.

Buzz opt out

2010-02-10T20:18:00.000-08:00

Apologies for the mundane posting, but if you find the sudden appearance of Google Buzz has you thinking of dropping gmail - there is a "turn off buzz" button at the bottom of the gmail screen. It works just fine: glad to have it gone.

Haiti Aid

2010-01-14T22:18:00.000-08:00

If you read this, please consider donating to help the victims of earthquake in Haiti. This blog entry links to the Red Cross.

Worthwhile bay area music - for families

2009-12-16T15:44:00.000-08:00

I had the opportunity to attend a performance of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra Sunday in a special performance aimed at children. Donato Cabrera conducted. The young performers really did an outstanding job: tight if not quite soulful, they exceeded my expectations. The overall program was great fun - interactive, with clapping and singing. The main classical settings featured works by Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev, two wonderful Russian composers. The capstone was a story-narration by Linda Ronstadt set to Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, Opus 67. If you have children these performances strike me as a great way to develop a love of great music and are highly recommended.

Our family is planning to attend (and sponsor) at least one of three upcoming performances in the bay area of a selection of Russian choral music (for which I have more than a soft spot). The concert is called NEVER SETTING LIGHT: A Day of Sacred Song in the Russian Choral Tradition and includes "a capella selections from the services of a liturgical day -- from sunset to sunrise. The ancient lyrics are set to the music of Russian and American choral masters from the 18th century to the present, including 5 pieces by northern California composers."

Performances:

Saturday, Feb. 20th Livermore - Asbury Methodist Church

Saturday, Feb 27th Oakland - Ascension Greek Cathedral

Sunday, Feb 28th Fremont - Mission San Jose

I expect these will be settings more traditional than, say, Rachmaninov's, Liturgy of St. John, but I am very much looking forward to these performances.

svod 2009

2009-10-27T07:18:00.000-07:00

This year's Silicon Valley Open Doors conference linking Russian technologists and Silicon Valley is scheduled for December 9-10 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Prior year participants and speakers I've known for some time have been consistently impressed with this event.

http://www.svod.org/2009/announcement

OpenWorld 2009

2009-10-12T14:47:00.000-07:00

This year's show has an almost electric feel to it: lots of enthusiasm and excitement about the 11g middleware offering, which is great to see up close. Kudos to Clemens Utschig for pulling together a great technical deep-dive session on SOA suite 11g today.

You can watch keynotes live or recorded by following this link.

Fusion Middleware 11g Kickoff - Moscow

2009-09-19T17:41:00.000-07:00

The rollout for the Fusion Middleware 11g release in Moscow next week: I will be participating in the presentations. The Russian press release has the details. I'm very excited about the 11g release - it's technically compelling but it also contains important advances for delivering business value.

WESOA 09 Call for Papers

2009-07-16T14:48:00.000-07:00

This year's workshop on Engineering Service Oriented Applications has been scheduled for November in Stockholm (still one of my favorite cities). Details follow - I will be working on the Program Committee again this year, so I'm looking forward to seeing submissions.

http://www.wesoa.org/

Many of today’s large-scale software projects in the area of distributed systems and especially enterprise IT adopt service-oriented software architecture and technologies. For these projects, availability of sound software engineering principles, methodology and tool support is mission-critical. However, traditional software engineering approaches are not fully appropriate for the development of service-oriented applications. The limitations of traditional methods in the context of service-oriented computing have led to the emergence of software service engineering (SSE) as a new specialist discipline, but research in this area is still immature and many open issues remain. There is an urgent need for research community and industry practitioners to develop comprehensive engineering principles, methodologies and tool support for the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC) of service-oriented applications. The WESOA 2009 workshop is the fifth in a series of workshops that focus on the specific aspects of SSE.

WESOA highlights key challenges of SSE that arise from specific characteristics of service-oriented applications that are often process-driven, loosely coupled, composed from autonomous services of complex IT landscapes and closely related to diverse socio-economic contexts. Service-oriented computing (SOC) enables the materialization of organizational processes as flexible compositions of autonomous service components. Stakeholders, domain experts, software architects and engineers instrument service-oriented software architectures (SOA) to drive constant organisational change by means of agile reengineering of software services, system landscapes and applications. In particular, service-oriented applications need to provide multiple, flexible and sometimes situational interaction channels within and beyond organizational structures and processes. Engineering of such software systems requires continuous, collaborative and cross-disciplinary development processes, methodologies and tools that synchronize multiple SDLCs of various SOA artefacts with organizational innovation processes.

Our aim is to facilitate exchange and evolution of ideas on SSE topics across multiple disciplines and to encourage participation of researchers and practitioners from academia and industry. In particular, collaboration will be fostered by means of a highly interactive and fast-paced workshop format.

Objectives

Topics

WESOA Series

WESOA'09 continues a successful series of former ICSOC workshops. During the past four editions, WESOA has demonstrated its relevance by constant high numbers of contributions and participants. Its impact is documented by consistent output of high-quality papers.

Publication

WESOA proceedings are published in the Springer LNCS Services Science Subline.

WESOA’09 encourages a multidisciplinary perspective and welcomes papers that address challenges of SSE in general or in the context of specific domains. Workshop topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

•Software service development lifecycle methodologies and processes
•Distributed and collaborative software service development
•Service-oriented reference models and frameworks
•Architectural styles and standards for software service systems
•Management and governance of SSE projects
•Models, languages and methods for service-oriented analysis and design
•Requirements-engineering for software service systems
•Service-oriented business process modelling
•SSE for cloud computing environments (e.g. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS)
•Validation, verification and testing of software service systems
•Service assembly, composition and aggregation models and languages
•Model-driven SOA and service systems development
•Reverse engineering of software service systems
•Tool support for software service engineering
•Case studies and best practices of service-oriented development

Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Release

2009-07-02T09:00:00.001-07:00

The 11g Middleware release has been released. Webcast of launch is here.

Principles of Transaction Processing, Second Edition

2009-07-01T15:58:00.000-07:00

I wanted to put out a brief note that the new version of Principles of Transaction Processing is hot off the presses. Simply put, this book is the standard reference for getting your brain around the transaction processing components of the IT landscape. It was the book I absorbed when I first started working on implementing transaction managers and one I turned to get up the speed on existing systems. I had a chance to review part of the book prior to publication, so I was lucky enough to get a free copy - Eric and Phil did a great job bringing the text up to date: it remains one of the handful of books that should be on the shelf of anyone involved in information systems implementation or management.

Russia and Web 2.0

2009-05-26T14:37:00.000-07:00

Zdrasvoyteye.

When I was in Moscow last, a lot of the talk was centered around attracting foreign capital to tech investments in Russia. The pitch is - or should be - familiar: lower costs, big market, super-bright engineers and scientists. The downside is lack of transparency and a very unique business environment that is difficult (or impossible) to navigate as an outsider. Today's announcement that Facebook has taken $200 million at first looks like a kind of a reversal in this trend: tech oriented Russians still have capital to deploy and may be choosing to spend it on bargain opportunities in the US market, which remains preeminent in technology development.

A closer look, though, suggests this is a part of a trend that has been gaining steam. Russians have been developing and investing in Web technology for a long while. Yes, Google was co-founded by a Russian, but there has been a number of interesting developments based in Russia itself. The Russian firm Yandex is often described as the "Russian Google" and has picked up small Russian social networking companies like Moi Krug on the cheap (someday there long awaited IPO will happen). SUP, run by American-in-Moscow Andrew Paulson, picked up LiveJournal to support their Russian users, and now Yuri Milner's fund takes a position in Facebook. Milner is the founder of mail.ru, a former physicist, and Wharton alumn.

Watch carefully: the Russians are coming to Silicon Valley and it's been a largely under-noted trend. I've met some of these folks and they are very capable businessmen.

Events for SCA

2009-05-07T10:38:00.000-07:00

InfoQ has a short synopsis of the event proposal that was released to add pub-sub style semantics to the SCA assembly model. The genesis of this lies in some ESB related work I had helped lead at Oracle back in the days when we first started to develop the SCA specifications - it took a long time to socialize this to the working group, but I'm very happy to see that that work has borne fruit. This fills an important gap in the specifications - previously, the wire driven semantics forced components to "externalize" pub-sub interactions in a way that was divorced from the SCA semantics - and is broadly applicable to many problem domains including Complex Event Processing, Queue/Pub-Sub style integration, and ESB scenarios.

I remain somewhat distressed over the way the channel abstraction has played out - the original idea divorced much of this from the assembly view and made it an aspect of system configuration. I think the current approach artificially mixes orthogonal aspects of the problem space. Having said that, this is a milestone for the specification and completes the basic assembly model nicely.

By the way, nice write up Boris!

Value at Risk

2009-02-25T13:13:00.001-08:00

I'm not going to editorialize on this one: here's a layperson accessible view of the risk models that worked so remarkably poorly in the last several years.

Darwin Dissected

2009-02-11T08:32:00.000-08:00

Though it may be impossible to miss, this year commemorates the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, who has justly been called the father of modern biology for this development of the theory of the evolutionary development of species. At times contentious, the fact of evolution has been long established beyond any kind of reasonable doubt - all schools of scientific knowledge are convergent in this regard. But to understand the true importance of evolution for biology as a whole, one of my favorite essays is by Theodosius Dobzhansky: "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."

In any case, I happen to find myself reading a facsimile of the original edition of On the Origin of Species - which I have had for many years but never read end to end. Coincidentally, the New York Times has a posted a great selection of passages by Darwin: read and enjoy.

When Finance Goes Mad

2008-12-27T15:41:00.000-08:00

Having come uncomfortably close to working in the packaging of structured financial investments, I've been morbidly fascinated by the way in which it has led to the near-destruction of the national - if not global - economy. Here is a great article on how badly awry things went with the ratings on these instruments, and a bit of what that means for stabilizing things.

Happy New Year

2008-12-22T11:16:00.000-08:00

I wanted to take just a moment and wish everyone a safe, happy and peaceful holiday season and new year. All the best to you and yours.

Liquidity Trap

2008-12-17T08:06:00.000-08:00

As the fed's latest cut pushes funds target rates toward zero, I am shocked that the news is not focused on whether the US faces a liquidity trap. Instead, there is very little discussion and markets seem to be neutral on the latest news.

The article I linked here is interesting for two reasons: one, it looks into the basic issues in some depth; two, it is clear that no one really understands what is happening. Note that Bruce Bartlett is arguing that the biggest danger we face now is deflation. Maybe. But two months ago, the biggest danger we faced was inflation: the latest swings in price indices seem more related to runaway boom-bust cycles in energy and commodities - too soon to really know what we face. Time will tell, of course, but only in a backward looking sense. At that point, we'll be passed the point where we needed the information.

Gimme Shelter

2008-11-23T13:44:00.000-08:00

Wild turkeys sensing Thanksgiving is nearly upon us gather in a safe place: my front lawn.

Budapester

2008-10-24T18:56:00.000-07:00

After several years of delay, my wife and I finally had a chance to spend a long anticipated weekend in Budapest, Hungary. I'll give my impressions in three parts: aesthetic, economic and historical. Second - for those anticipating a visit - a few suggestions for tourists.

On several occasions, the first question I've gotten about Budapest is "what's it like?" To be frank, I've struggled to compare it to other central European cities I've visited: unlike, say, Prague, the oldest portions of Budapest are quite small: the city was the scene of many battles from the Turkish occupation through the second world war; in the latter, the Soviet army and the Nazi army clashed directly in the
city itself. With some notable exceptions, the city is redolent with 19th century facades. In fact, many of the buildings are quite impressive. My wife commented that to see Budapest, one has to be constantly looking upward.

Although it is hard to say exactly how any country is going to weather the current economic storm, Hungary has clearly experienced strong growth rates in recent years. Budapest itself reflects both a low post-Soviet starting point and the economic boom of recent years. Elegant restaurants are close to classic looking buildings suffering
from disrepair. Pricing is erratic at best. One can find a 1 USD cup of coffee, or spend 12 USD for coffee and pastry, all within a block. For a great view of the food of Hungary, traditional restaurants and the Central Market in Pest are great experiences: be prepared for tons of paprika.

A traditional breakfast at the Central Market!

The standard tourist circuit is worth doing. Budapest's museums are interesting though modest: meaning, it is possible to explore many in a day's time. There are several houses of worship that are worth visiting; in particular I recommend the Matyas Church in Old Buda and the Great Synagogue in Pest.

Matyas.

The Great Synagogue is the largest synagogue in Europe and the second largest in the world. The building is a 19th century construction and features continental Christian influence in features such as a (substantial) pipe organ: the same instrument is present in the even more beautiful Spanish Synagogue in Prague.

Time permitting, there is a modest Serbian Orthodox church on Szerb Utra ("Serb Street"), with an older iconostasis and the sweet smell of incense hanging in the air. The famous St. Stephen's cathedral is beautiful but also very modern.

And of course Budapest is famous for the public baths. We visited the baths in the central park, which is an experience not to miss. There are consultants available that will help construct a therapeutic regime while you are there, though we opted to wing it: both relaxing and revitalizing. Be forewarned: the plunge pool may not have ice crystals in the water, but it is … cold.

There are two less well-known options for visitors that I wanted to point out. First, the Terror Museum in Pest is a must-see. The Hungarians suffered under both a Nazi putsch and Soviet occupation. The Terror Museum is set in the secret police headquarters (shared by both regimes) and provides a bracing portrait of totalitarian terror as seen from the Hungarian experience. The first exhibit in the museum
was perhaps the most moving: videos of cheering and weeping crowds supporting both regimes cutting abruptly to the destruction and death concomitant with their rises. This was not an uplifting part of our visit, but a sobering and necessary look at two forms of evil.

The second thing to note about Budapest is the excellent restaurant scene. We had some of the best meals we have had in a long time in Pest. The restaurant Tigris near St. Stephen's Cathedral has fantastic food, wine and the most enthusiastic staff I've ever encountered. The "contemporary Hungarian" tasting menu at Babel was great: the chef
has a deft take on gastronomical science. Try both if you can.

The title of this post is taken from the iconic Vass shoe, the somewhat awkward looking, central European classic. The factory store is on Harris Kos in Pest and worth a visit for anyone interested in old world craftsmanship. There's a romanticism about much of Budapest tied up with the ubiquitous craftsmanship to be found.

All photos by Ruth Pavlik: they may not be used without permission.

Wild Ride

2008-09-29T20:23:00.000-07:00

What an extraordinary few weeks we've been through economically. The economic system has started to unzip and then snap back several times: the scariest thing I saw was the more than doubling of the LIBOR rate over night. And the control of short sales is a step to nationalizing equity markets: incredible! And while, things continue to adjust and move forward, we are, for better or worse, living through an inflection point in economic history.

I was in Moscow, Russia a few weeks back when the Russian central bank had to intervene to support the ruble. At that point, cooler heads seemed to have been regaining center stage and the political climate between the US and Russia seemed to warming a bit since the Georgia conflict. Then, right before I left, a US vice president candidate speculated that we might have to go to war with Russia! A week later, the Russian markets closed for several days. I'll have a report on my Russia trip in a few days, but I'll preface it by saying it was fascinating.

I escaped the economic chatter last week by attending Oracle's Open World conference. This was by far the best Open World I have seen: customers were very enthusiastic and the show was extremely well coordinated. Getting back to core technology was a great break from some of the bleaker world news. I arrived home late Saturday and then was back on a plane this morning: only to learn that Wachovia had been dispatched!

Deika Morrison blog

2008-09-29T14:04:00.000-07:00

I wanted to point readers to the new blog of a friend of mine, Deika Morrison. She has an extremely interesting background: she served as a Senator and Minister of State for Finance and Planning for the country of Jamaica, is a business expert, and is a careful thinker. She's also one of the nicest people I know.

I continue to believe that so-called emerging markets are the well spring of innovative ideas in economics and business. Brazil, Israel, Russia, China, Jamaica are all interesting places where necessity has proven to be the mother not just of invention but innovation: Deika's blog should help illustrate what I mean.

SVOD: Tech Sector in Russia

2008-09-04T08:39:00.000-07:00

This year's Silicon Valley Open Doors conference has been scheduled, the dates are November 20-21. This is the premiere opportunity to learn about the technology sector and venture capital opportunities in and around Russia and understand more about what is happening with Russian companies. Hope to see you there.

Give Back/Help Out

2008-08-27T16:19:00.000-07:00

I (slightly) modified the right hand side of my blog to include some charities that I support. In some cases, I have good friends that have dedicated their professional lives to helping to build these organizations.

These don't even begin to scratch the surface of great organizations that offer great ways to help others. I listed these because I know a bit more about them personally and I'm confident that they do good (efficiently!). Another good friend, Edwin, recently added a blog post on Abilities United, which works with kids experiencing challenges in development and gives them special attention based on their needs. Take a careful look at Abilities United: they deserve support and all the help they can get.

Cisco launches Russia/CIS fund

2008-08-24T06:10:00.000-07:00

Brent Marcus left a note that Cisco recently announced a Russia focused venture fund. I will be in Moscow in a few weeks and will try to get some first hand information to blog about.

Data grids and the Web

2008-08-19T09:27:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of talk recently about web 2.0, social networks, and cloud computing. To my way of thinking, these are very much overlapping categories. One useful technology that can be used support all of these models is the concept of a "data grid": high performance, distributed and reliable caching technology. On-Demand Enterprise has a good profile of AbeBooks.com, which uses Oracle Coherence technology to support their web site.

The First Rome

2008-08-10T16:56:00.000-07:00

I spent the last two weeks on holiday in Italy. This was the first time I've taken two weeks off from work in nearly 20 years, so this felt like a much needed break. We traveled to Rome for several days, then on to the Amalfi coast, and across the country to Romagna and then spent our last few days in Venice. Three things struck me about Italy: the warm and passionate people, the incredible food, and the rich cultural and religious history that one encounters – in many ways is confronted with – throughout the country. Here are a few of photos and some thoughts along the way.

Rome sits under waves of consecutive civilizations. There is the indelible imprint of the Greek, Roman, early Christian, Byzantine, Gothic, Frankish, and ultimately modern world in Rome. It's not an exaggeration to suggest that you could spend many lifetimes absorbed in studying the remnants of each: the city is history alive. Our hotel was right down the street from the Colosseum: to best grasp the complexity of the operations of the Colosseum, you need to walk the insides. From here, you can see something of the scale, still impressive in a modern city. Many of the blood sport scenes involved animals that were kept below the center of the stadium. You can see the basic layout in this photo.

The next photo is the Arch of Constantine, the emperor that in many ways was responsible for the Christianity Europe still knows it today: he called the first Ecumenical Council at Nicea in 364 AD, which established the basic dogmatic creed for the faith. The arch also illustrates the engineering prowess of the Romans: note also that Italy still runs potable fountains throughout the city that were based on the acquaducts established by the Romans as well.

We visited the Vatican, including St. Peter's and the Vatican Museum. What an incredible wealth of Renaissance art. The scale of St. Peter's is awe inspiring, though the artistic motif is very much humanist. The church retains the old style of a domed church, so common in the Byzantine tradition; inside each dome is an elaborate series of paintings:

A haunting view of St. Peter in Glory (the dove represents the Holy Spirit):

It was, however, the Vatican Museum, that most impressed and surprised me by its scale and beauty. As we were touring with child, we had to move rather quickly through the museum to visit the Sistine Chapel, our top target. However, here is a view of one of the corridors leading through the museum. The museum is one of the main things in Rome I'd like to return to visit for a few days of sustained study:

When we left Rome, we traveled to the Amalfi coast for the better part of five days, partially for relaxation. A snapshot of the beach area below the cliff into which our hotel (La Terrazze: highly recommended for both location and the dinners) was built.

Here is the exterior of St. Andrea's Cathedral in Amalfi: note the cultural interplay between Byzantine and Arabesque styling; Amalfi was once a major port city and trading center in the Mediterranean.

A closeup of the mosaics of the twelve apostles, again, Byzantine in style.

The American novelist Gore Vidal described Ravello as the most beautiful place he had visited in all his travels. I concur. The church of St. Panteleone on the main piazza contained several throwbacks to early Christianity: the blood relics of Panteleone from 306 AD and an old icon of the virgin Mary. This seems to me to echo the early apostolic churches, which transferred dogma through liturgy, iconography and the veneration of saints, rather than scripture (the New Testament canon had not yet been formed at the time of Panteleone). Here are some fresco remains with an air of antiquity:

We spent several days in Romagna, a great family destination for relaxing on the Adriatic beaches. We explored the medieval hill towns by car. Stunning vistas overlooking valleys, olive groves and vineyards.

After Romagna, we had a few days in Venice. A remarkable city, though after a few days, we were glad to escape the throngs of tourists. Venice is a place to explore for three reasons: history, art and architecture. San Marco Basilica combines all three and is rightly considered the centerpiece of the city. Here are some external shots of Venice (photos in the interior of San Marco are forbidden, but the interior mosaics are stunning).

Switching gears: if the export of tourists is any indicator of macroeconomic conditions, pay attention to Venice. The tourists from Europe were, as always, predominantly German. But I was stunned by the throngs of Russian tourists, something I rarely encountered five years ago. Similarly, Japanese tourists still lead the visitors from Asia, but they were joined by lots of visitors from China. Of course, China and Russia have both been doing well, so perhaps this is evidence of well-known trends.

All photos by Ruth Pavlik; no photos may be reused without permission.

Solzhenitsyn remembered

2008-08-05T07:14:00.000-07:00

I read Solzhenitsyn relatively late, much later than I should have. For me, his work will always serve as a warning about how readily humans can be trapped in a cycle of cruelty and exploitation: both as exploited and exploiters. I read dozens on essays remembering Solzhenitsyn over the last few days; I thought this piece from der Speigel captured the Western perspective quite well: he was never really understood by those who received him in exile, that he was sometimes thoroughly wrong headed, and that he was undoubtedly one of the greatest men of the last century.

WESOA 08 Workshop (second CFP)

2008-08-04T18:51:00.000-07:00

S E C O N D C A L L F O R P A P E R S

4th INT. WORKSHOP ON ENGINEERING SERVICE ORIENTED APPLICATIONS:
"SERVICE-ORIENTED ANALYSIS AND DESIGN" (WESOA'08)

In conjunction with the 6th Int. Conference on Service Oriented
Computing (ICSOC 2008) http://www.icsoc.org/

Sydney, Australia, December 1st, 2008

WESOA Workshop Website http://www.wesoa.org/

Abstract Submission Due: Oct. 1st, 2008

OBJECTIVES
==========

In large-scale software projects that increasingly adopt
service-oriented software architecture and technologies, availability
of sound systems engineering principles, -methodology and -tools for
service-oriented applications is mission-critical for project success.
However, engineering service-oriented applications poses specific
requirements that differ from traditional software engineering and
service systems engineering (SSE) is not yet established.
Consequently, there is an urgent need for research community and
industry practitioners to develop comprehensive engineering
principles, methodologies and tool support for the entire software
development lifecycle of service-oriented applications.

The WESOA series of workshops addresses challenges of service systems
engineering that arise from unique characteristics of service-oriented
applications. Service-oriented applications closely resemble the
organisation principles of their application domains that are often
process-driven networks. They are compositions of service system
components that are provided by autonomous stakeholders based on
unique assets and capabilities. Therefore, service-oriented
applications often have a social dimension and can be regarded as
constituents of social service communities. It is the challenge of
service systems engineering to not only cope with these specific
circumstances but to capitalise on them with radically new approaches.
The WESOA series addresses these challenges and particularly
concentrates on the aspects of service-oriented analysis and design
that provide principles methodology and tool support to capture the
characteristic requirements of networked service communities and
transform them into reusable high-quality service system designs that
underpin and drive the holistic service-oriented development
lifecycle.

WESOA'08 continues a successful series of former ICSOC
workshops. During the past three editions, WESOA has demonstrated its
relevance by constant high numbers of contributions and participants.
Its impact is documented by consistent output of high-quality papers
that regularly satisfied requirements of Springer and led to a special
issue of IJCSSE.

TOPICS
======

WESOA'08 encourages a multidisciplinary perspective and welcomes
papers that address challenges of service-oriented systems
engineering, analysis and design in general or in the context of
specific domains. Workshop topics of interest include, but are not
limited to the following:

* Service systems development lifecycle methodologies
* Service-oriented reference models and modelling frameworks
* Service-oriented analysis and design patterns
* Models, languages and methods for service-oriented domain analysis
* Analysis and design for service-based organisations, social networks
and communities
* Requirements-engineering for service systems
* Service-oriented business processes modelling
* Engineering methods for design of reusable and composable services
* Service-oriented analysis and design for grid-computing, e-Science
and cloud computing
* Architectural styles and standards for service systems
* Contract and policy design for service systems
* Design of service systems choreography and orchestration
* Service assembly, composition and aggregation models and languages
* Validation and verification of service systems
* Tools support for analysis and design of service systems
* Model-driven SOA and service systems development
* Case studies and best practices of service-oriented analysis, design
and development

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
=======================

Authors are invited to submit original, previously unpublished
research papers. Papers should be written in English and must not
exceed 12 pages, strictly following Springer LNCS style
(http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html) including all text,
references, appendices, and figures. Please, submit papers via the
WESOA conference management tool (see WESOA website) in PDF format.

All submissions will be peer-reviewed by members of the international
program committee. Paper acceptance will be based on originality,
significance, technical soundness, and clarity of presentation.
Accepted papers will be included in the workshop proceedings, and
circulated to participants prior to the event. Workshop proceedings
will be published as a Springer LNCS volume.

At least one author of an accepted paper must register and participate
in the workshop. Registration is subject to the terms, conditions and
procedure of the ICSOC conference to be found on their website
http://www.icsoc.org/.

IMPORTANT DATES
===============

* Abstract Submission Due: October 1, 2008
* Paper Submission Due: October 6, 2008
* Notification of Acceptance: November 3, 2008
* Camera-Ready Copy Due: November 24, 2008
* Workshop Date: December 1, 2008

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
=================

* Sudhir Agarwal, Karlsruhe University (TH), DE
* Marco Aiello, University of Groningen, NL
* Sami Bhiri, DERI Galway, IE
* Jen-Yao Chung, IBM T.J. Watson Research, US
* Oscar Corcho, University of Manchester, GB
* Vincenzo D'andrea, University of Trento, IT
* Valeria de Castro, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, ES
* Gregorio Diaz, University of Castilla La Mancha, ES
* Schahram Dustdar, Technical University of Vienna, AT
* Wolfgang Emmerich, University College London, GB
* George Feuerlicht, Sydney University of Technology, AU
* Stefan Fischer, University of Luebeck, DE
* Howard Foster, Imperial College London, GB
* Paul Greenfield, CSIRO, AU
* Rannia Khalaf, IBM watson Research, US
* Bernd Krämer, Fernuniversität Hagen, DE
* Winfried Lamersdorf, University of Hamburg, DE
* Heiko Ludwig, IBM Research, US
* Tiziana Margaria-Steffen, University of Potsdam , DE
* E. Michael Maximilien, IBM Almaden Research, US
* Massimo Mecella, Univ. Roma LA SAPIENZA, IT
* Harald Meyer, HPI Potsdam, DE
* Daniel Moldt, University of Hamburg, DE
* Josef Noll, Telenor R&D, NO
* Guadalupe Ortiz Bellot, University of Extremadura, ES
* Rebecca Parsons, ThoughtWorks, US
* Greg Pavlik, Oracle, US
* Pierluigi Plebani, Politecnico di Milano, IT
* Franco Raimondi, University College London, GB
* Wolfgang Reisig, Humboldt-University Berlin, DE
* Thomas Risse, L3S Research Center, DE
* Norbert Ritter, University of Hamburg, DE
* Dumitru Roman, DERI Innsbruck, AT
* Stefan Tai, Karlsruhe University (TH), DE
* Willem-Jan van den Heuvel, Tilburg University, NL
* Walid Gaaloul, DERI Galway, IE
* Jim Webber, ThoughtWorks, AU

Catching Up

2008-07-04T08:27:00.000-07:00

Between work and holiday, I haven't been able to post much to the blog over the last 6 weeks. I am going to do a series of updates. Outside of work, I've been thinking a bit about the future of the web architecture, emerging markets and human social and religious history: post coming up related to all topics.

1) I was out of the country when Feedly was rolled out. I will talk about Feedly, why it is important and do a series of reviews on the technology.

2) I am hoping to publish details on a venture fund investing in Africa that I think will be quite interesting in the near future.

3) A longish entry on my recent holiday in Italy, including "the first Rome" is in the works.

Hope all that is of interest.

WESOA 08 Workshop

2008-05-27T10:40:00.000-07:00

In general, WESOA is a productive exchange of experiences and ideas. I am reviewing papers again this year for the program committee and I encourage you to consider writing up a paper that covers practical experiences in SOA implementations and applications.

C A L L F O R P A P E R S

4th INT. WORKSHOP ON ENGINEERING SERVICE ORIENTED APPLICATIONS:
"SERVICE-ORIENTED ANALYSIS AND DESIGN" (WESOA'08)

In conjunction with the 6th Int. Conference on Service Oriented
Computing (ICSOC 2008) http://www.icsoc.org/

Sydney, Australia, December 1st, 2008

WESOA Workshop Website http://www.wesoa.org/

Abstract Submission Due: Sep. 1st, 2008

OBJECTIVES
==========

In large-scale software projects that increasingly adopt
service-oriented software architecture and technologies, availability
of sound systems engineering principles, -methodology and -tools for
service-oriented applications is mission-critical for project success.
However, engineering service-oriented applications poses specific
requirements that differ from traditional software engineering and
service systems engineering (SSE) is not yet established.
Consequently, there is an urgent need for research community and
industry practitioners to develop comprehensive engineering
principles, methodologies and tool support for the entire software
development lifecycle of service-oriented applications.

The WESOA series of workshops addresses challenges of service systems
engineering that arise from unique characteristics of service-oriented
applications. Service-oriented applications closely resemble the
organisation principles of their application domains that are often
process-driven networks. They are compositions of service system
components that are provided by autonomous stakeholders based on
unique assets and capabilities. Therefore, service-oriented
applications often have a social dimension and can be regarded as
constituents of social service communities. It is the challenge of
service systems engineering to not only cope with these specific
circumstances but to capitalise on them with radically new approaches.
The WESOA series addresses these challenges and particularly
concentrates on the aspects of service-oriented analysis and design
that provide principles methodology and tool support to capture the
characteristic requirements of networked service communities and
transform them into reusable high-quality service system designs that
underpin and drive the holistic service-oriented development
lifecycle.

WESOA'08 continues a successful series of former ICSOC
workshops. During the past three editions, WESOA has demonstrated its
relevance by constant high numbers of contributions and participants.
Its impact is documented by consistent output of high-quality papers
that regularly satisfied requirements of Springer and led to a special
issue of IJCSSE.

TOPICS
======

WESOA'08 encourages a multidisciplinary perspective and welcomes
papers that address challenges of service-oriented systems
engineering, analysis and design in general or in the context of
specific domains. Workshop topics of interest include, but are not
limited to the following:

* Service systems development lifecycle methodologies
* Service-oriented reference models and modelling frameworks
* Service-oriented analysis and design patterns
* Models, languages and methods for service-oriented domain analysis
* Analysis and design for service-based organisations, social networks
and communities
* Requirements-engineering for service systems
* Service-oriented business processes modelling
* Engineering methods for design of reusable and composable services
* Service-oriented analysis and design for grid-computing, e-Science
and cloud computing
* Architectural styles and standards for service systems
* Contract and policy design for service systems
* Design of service systems choreography and orchestration
* Service assembly, composition and aggregation models and languages
* Validation and verification of service systems
* Tools support for analysis and design of service systems
* Model-driven SOA and service systems development
* Case studies and best practices of service-oriented analysis, design
and development

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
=======================

Authors are invited to submit original, previously unpublished
research papers. Papers should be written in English and must not
exceed 12 pages, strictly following Springer LNCS style
(http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html) including all text,
references, appendices, and figures. Please, submit papers via the
WESOA conference management tool (see WESOA website) in PDF format.

All submissions will be peer-reviewed by members of the international
program committee. Paper acceptance will be based on originality,
significance, technical soundness, and clarity of presentation.
Accepted papers will be included in the workshop proceedings, and
circulated to participants prior to the event. Workshop proceedings
will be published as a Springer LNCS volume.

At least one author of an accepted paper must register and participate
in the workshop. Registration is subject to the terms, conditions and
procedure of the ICSOC conference to be found on their website
http://www.icsoc.org/.

IMPORTANT DATES
===============

* Abstract Submission Due: September 1, 2008
* Paper Submission Due: October 6, 2008
* Notification of Acceptance: November 3, 2008
* Camera-Ready Copy Due: November 24, 2008
* Workshop Date: December 1, 2008

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
=================

* Sudhir Agarwal, Karlsruhe University (TH), DE
* Marco Aiello, University of Groningen, NL
* Sami Bhiri, DERI Galway, IE
* Jen-Yao Chung, IBM T.J. Watson Research, US
* Oscar Corcho, University of Manchester, GB
* Vincenzo D'andrea, University of Trento, IT
* Valeria de Castro, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, ES
* Gregorio Diaz, University of Castilla La Mancha, ES
* Schahram Dustdar, Technical University of Vienna, AT
* Wolfgang Emmerich, University College London, GB
* George Feuerlicht, Sydney University of Technology, AU
* Stefan Fischer, University of Luebeck, DE
* Howard Foster, Imperial College London, GB
* Paul Greenfield, CSIRO, AU
* Rannia Khalaf, IBM watson Research, US
* Bernd Krämer, Fernuniversität Hagen, DE
* Winfried Lamersdorf, University of Hamburg, DE
* Heiko Ludwig, IBM Research, US
* Tiziana Margaria-Steffen, University of Potsdam , DE
* E. Michael Maximilien, IBM Almaden Research, US
* Massimo Mecella, Univ. Roma LA SAPIENZA, IT
* Harald Meyer, HPI Potsdam, DE
* Daniel Moldt, University of Hamburg, DE
* Josef Noll, Telenor R&D, NO
* Guadalupe Ortiz Bellot, University of Extremadura, ES
* Rebecca Parsons, ThoughtWorks, US
* Greg Pavlik, Oracle, US
* Pierluigi Plebani, Politecnico di Milano, IT
* Franco Raimondi, University College London, GB
* Wolfgang Reisig, Humboldt-University Berlin, DE
* Thomas Risse, L3S Research Center, DE
* Norbert Ritter, University of Hamburg, DE
* Dumitru Roman, DERI Innsbruck, AT
* Stefan Tai, Karlsruhe University (TH), DE
* Willem-Jan van den Heuvel, Tilburg University, NL
* Walid Gaaloul, DERI Galway, IE
* Jim Webber, ThoughtWorks, AU
* Christian Zirpins, Karlsruhe University (TH), DE

ORGANISING COMMITTEE
====================

Jen-Yao Chung
IBM T.J. Watson Research, USA

Wolfgang Emmerich
University College London, UK

Guadalupe Ortiz
University of Extremadura, Spain

Christian Zirpins
University of Karlsruhe (TH), Germany

If you have further queries please email to the workshop chairs on:
chairs wesoa.org

--------------------------------------------------------------------

--
Dr. Guadalupe Ortiz Bellot
Assistant Professor
Computer Science Department
University of Extremadura

gobellot@unex.es
http://personales.ya.com/gobellot/

Quercus Software Engineering Group
http://quercusseg.unex.es

Silicon Valley Open Doors

2008-05-09T09:29:00.000-07:00

The SVOD 08 conference is now set for November 13-14. This conference looks at Russian venture opportunities, focused on early stage companies and technology. It's the premiere event in the US of its kind: if you have an interest in early stage companies eastern Europe or Russia, plan for this event.

JavaOne 2008

2008-05-07T17:56:00.000-07:00

I was supposed to be a panelist for BOF 5846, a session organized by my friend Mark Little, exploring how OSGi informs SOA implementations and strategies. Unfortunately, I had to cancel out due to travel conflicts, but stop by the BOF at the show if you are there. Alex Alves from BEA (now Oracle too) will be taking my slot and talking about his experience using OSGi as the substructure of the BEA Event Server.

Also, in case you missed Thomas Kurian's keynote this morning, the JavaOne site is hosting some video clips: this clip, which features Kevin Clugage showing off the SOA platform preview's SCA support and Mike Lehmann demonstrating WebLogic's operations console and JRockit realtime. Both are definitely worth watching.

DOA 08 Call For Papers Reminder

2008-04-29T17:30:00.000-07:00

I am co-chairing the middleware track for the OTM conference in Mexico this year. Take a look at the Call for Papers: I'm hoping to see some good submissions.

OTM 2008 Federated Conferences - Call For Papers
Monterry (Mexico), November 9 - 14, 2008
http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/fedconf/

BRIEF OVERVIEW

"OnTheMove (OTM) to Meaningful Internet Systems and Ubiquitous Computing"
co-locates five successful related and complementary conferences:
- International Symposium on Distributed Objects and Applications (DOA'08)
- International Conference on Ontologies, Databases and Applications of
Semantics (ODBASE'08)
- International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS'08)
- International Symposium on Grid computing, high-performAnce and Distributed
Applications (GADA'08)
- International Symposium on Information Security (IS'08)

Each conference covers multiple research vectors, viz. theory (e.g. underlying
formalisms), conceptual (e.g. technical designs and conceptual solutions) and
applications (e.g. case studies and industrial best practices). All five
conferences share the scientific study of the distributed, conceptual and
ubiquitous aspects of modern computing systems, and share the resulting
application-pull created by the WWW.

PAPER SUBMISSION SITE
http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/fedconf/index.html?page=submit

IMPORTANT DEADLINES:

- Abstract submission: June 8, 2008
- Paper submission: June 15, 2008
- Acceptance notification: August 10, 2008
- Camera ready: August 25, 2008
- Registration: August 25, 2008
- OTM Conferences: November 9 - 14, 2008

PROGRAM COMMITTEE CHAIRS

CoopIS PC Co-Chairs (coopis2008@cs.rmit.edu.au)
* Johann Eder, University of Klagenfurt, Austria
* Masaru Kitsuregawa, University of Tokyo, Japan
* Ling Liu, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

DOA PC Co-Chairs (doa2008@cs.rmit.edu.au)
* Mark Little, Red Hat, UK
* Alberto Montresor, University of Trento, Italy
* Greg Pavlik, Oracle, USA

ODBASE PC Co-Chairs (odbase2008@cs.rmit.edu.au)
* Malu Castellanos, HP, USA
* Fausto Giunchiglia, University of Trento, Italy
* Feng Ling, Tsinghua University, China

GADA PC Co-Chairs (gada2008@cs.rmit.edu.au)
* Dennis Gannon, Indiana University, USA
* Pilar Herrero, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
* Daniel S. Katz, Louisiana State University, USA
* María S. Pérez, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain

IS PC Co-Chairs (is2008@cs.rmit.edu.au)
* Jong Hyuk Park, Kyungnam University, Korea
* Bart Preneel, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
* Ravi Sandhu, University of Texas, USA
* André Zúquete, University of Aveiro, Portugal

Israeli Startups Part Two

2008-04-29T17:28:00.000-07:00

A follow on panel May 1 in Palo Alto discussing successful tech companies birthed in Israel.

Darwin Online

2008-04-22T12:17:00.000-07:00

I'm a part time science buff, by which I mean I enjoy science but don't always have bandwidth to stay up on science news. However, present work necessarily builds on the past and it's always a pleasure to spend time looking back at the history of science. I recently discovered this very cool repository of the complete works of Charles Darwin. It's humbling to realize the number of fundamental insights that Darwin was able to decipher from this observations: he was truly one of history's great geniuses. Nature recently ran a wonderful story on Darwin's key contributions to current scientific understanding, though it unfortunately requires a subscription.

Russian millionare count soaring

2008-04-22T06:29:00.000-07:00

Kommersant reports that the number of Russian millionaires is now greater than the number of Indian millionaires. I had to do a double take on this: the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of India is economic growth and transformation. Perhaps that is giving India a bit of short change, since it also boasts a rich cultural and religious history that has influenced large swaths of the globe.

To an extent, this reinforces my belief that Russia is the hidden gem in so-called emerging markets at the moment. While this may be a cause for celebration, it is also a cause for concern: take a deeper look and you'll find that the wealth is being generated predominantly in connection with extractive industries. This means the economy is vulnerable to price pullbacks in commodities and not structured to experience the kind of explosive and sustainable growth associated with technology and intellectual industries. Extraction based economies have had a devil of a time diversifying. The Kremlin is looking to address this in fits and starts (see previous posts that look at some of initiatives of the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade), but it is a decisive matter for the future of the Russian economy that will influence the country for generations to come.

In the meantime, I believe India is doing a lot of the right things, especially by building industry (and wealth) organically, based on intellectual capital. They are still leading the way for emerging markets and in some ways for everyone.

Coaldale History

2008-04-10T13:37:00.000-07:00

I got feedback from several people interested in coal mining history in Pennsylvania based on my previous blog entry, none of whom I know: it's amazing how many random connections you get from Web searches. In any case, I wanted to link to a really interesting set of articles that traces the history of the region around Coaldale in its early stage, including the tensions that existed in the mining communities. I remember hearing stories as a kid about the "Black Marias" that would drop off the bodies of miners after an accident.

The source site is an interesting assembly of Carpatho-Rusyn immigrant histories, which is part of the background on my grandmother's side. By her generation, everyone seemed to think of themselves generically as Russian, but the background of many was more diverse and our family has a variety of Eastern Slavic traditions. For example, most of the Pascha activities I remember best were heavily influenced by the traditions of Ukraine.

The Carpatho-Rusyn ethnic group is not well known. As a matter of interest, here's a link to an overview of their history. Many were probably Uniate or so-called Greek Catholics, though in the US they were poorly received by the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic church and I believe many moved back after centuries to the Eastern Orthodox church, specifically under the autocephalous church in Moscow. Other Eastern European ethnic groups in the region included, according the the New York Times, Poles, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Russians, Jews and Hungarians. The derogatory term "Hunky" was a generic reference to Eastern European immigrants in this region, derived from the fact that many of the immigrants were believed to have migrated from the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Thinking of an MBA?

2008-04-07T11:30:00.000-07:00

Seems like perceptions of the worth of an MBA are highly cyclical, but there's no doubt that a good business school has a lot to offer for professional development. I chose to go back for an MBA after a specific experience: I realized that I really didn't understand VC term sheets or the underlying financial models when I really needed to know what I was dealing with.

Once you decide you want an MBA, you have to decide where you want to go. I looked in the US and ultimately only applied to one school. It's been understood for a while that European business schools are very good. As BusinessWeek notes, they are getting progressively better: they also offer an attractive alternative to American schools for professionals that plan to invest their professional life outside the US.

The other thing that is striking: business schools are becoming a sign of economic sophistication in economies that not too long ago were devoid of private business altogether. I am happy to see new schools developing in Eastern Europe. BusinessWeek also provides an interesting peek at Skolkovo Moscow School of Management, a new B-school being built in Russia and a key development in the maturation of the Russian economy. I've been spending a lot of time on a study of the Russian business environment, and I can tell you that many managers are very excited about this.

It may be that my age has something to do with it, but I find that many of my friends are asking me if they should consider an MBA. At some point, I'll give my thoughts on the chief benefits of an MBA, at least based on my first-hand experiences. Whether the investment (the time investment is likely to be the most dear) is worth it is a deeply personal decision, but maybe I can add some insight. Though I believe that Wharton remains the best business school in the world, I think that prospective B-school students should look at a number of options and I would put international schools on the top of the list.

A Small World After All

2008-03-31T06:50:00.000-07:00

I was doing some browsing and stumbled on this video that shows my great-uncle's house collapsing into an abandoned coal mine in the northeastern Pennsylvania town of Coaldale. A great metaphor for the decline of the region, with a personal twist.

Coal mining was hard work and often lead to a very short life. If you happen to be in the vicinity of the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania at some point, I recommend visiting the Eckley Miner's village for an historical perspective on the mining life. My great grandfather was fortunate, as he was able to run his own contract mining crew (not bad for someone that arrived in the US without any adults around the age of 10, speaking only Russian), though he ultimately died of mining related lung disease. My grandfather was doubly fortunate, as he was able to leave the region without working in the mines and before the economic base collapsed.

I don't know who posted the YouTube videos on Coaldale, but they are quite interesting on a personal level. In the business and church video, you can see a quick snapshot of St. Mary's Russian Orthodox church, which my great grandfather helped to build. The last time I was there was for a funeral when I was a child, but I believe it is still there and still functioning. This video is also a neat reminder of what small town America used to be like.

Social Not-working?

2008-03-25T08:52:00.000-07:00

Some former colleagues, both old and more recent, have started a company called Ringside Networks, building a platform to integrate and host social networking technologies within corporate web sites. The company is releasing part of the source code on an open source model to drive adoption, so check them out: there's no cost and lots of transparency. I like the fact that new business models are emerging for startups, though the exit options are limited to acquisition, valuations have been high for companies with open source products that have gained scale.

In this case, the business model is doubly interesting, as it aims at a hybrid of SaaS and in-house technologies: part of the pitch is that social applications are too important to be captive to third-parties. If large companies (especially retailers) find that they want more ownership of their customers, this may be a very interesting play.

Cetaceans among us

2008-03-24T11:46:00.000-07:00

I had a chance to take my family on a three hour whale watch chartered out of Half Moon Bay on Sunday. After about an hour we wound up spotting several gray whales; baleen whales that I am told can grow to as large as 14 feet. For the most part, we were seeing the smoke-like "poof" of the whale expelling through its blow hole. My daughter was able to spot the fluke at one point. Then, suddenly, the larger gray jumped out of the water, exposing the majority of the whale's body to view. Amazing.

We did not get a picture of the whale, as each spotting was quite sudden. However, the overall effect was considerably more dramatic than the spotting photo I have linked to from Wikipedia.

On a slightly related topic, the migration of the blow hole to its present position on the whale's head is one of the more interesting parts of aquatic evolution.

Israeli Startup Panel (This Week!)

2008-03-24T11:35:00.000-07:00

There's a panel in the Palo Alto area this week looking at Israeli startups with ties to silicon valley, organized by a local group CoolTech, this week. Israel (Tel Aviv in particular) is one of the few places that has been successful in transplanting the "American" venture capital model. Clearly, enlightened government policies had a formative influence on venture capital development in Israel, as did a business culture tolerant of risk and failure; it is also an incredibly exuberant business environment. In fact, when talking with Israeli VCs, I'm struck by how similar their outlook is to American VCs. And yet, there is undoubtedly more to the story. Israel's domestic market is small and the target for intellectual property is invariably external markets. The differences may in fact be more important than the similarities, since they open up new channels for discovering innovative business models. For that reason, Israel is an essential case study for economies around the globe that aspire to a dynamic technology marketplace.

Creative Thinking in Private Equity

2008-03-13T08:52:00.000-07:00

I recently had a chance to attend a meeting with a partner from Aventura Investment Partners as a part of a Wharton program looking at private equity in emerging markets, an area that I find extremely exciting. Aventura is doing several investments in Senegal, targeted at the value chain around agricultural production and also in health care. I can't go into the business models they are using right now, but there is some very innovative thinking required to bring development to areas like rural Senegal. As one of my Nigerian friends recently commented to me, traditional "aid" just hasn't worked. This is the kind of private initiative that has the chance to make dramatic and sustainable changes in a society. I imagine we will see a lot more funds take on challenges around development, especially if projects like these have success.

Civic Pride

2008-03-10T19:41:00.000-07:00

Shamong was rated the 6th best town in New Jersey Magazine this year, owing no doubt partially to the fact that it is an attractive, quiet place, with a lot of nice people. Philadelphia magazine also showed that Shamong was one of the best residential towns in South Jersey for homeowners.

Gulag Archipelago

2008-03-10T19:35:00.000-07:00

I try to read at least one novel a month to keep myself sane. Last month, I stumbled on an old hardback copy of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, which I picked up for 2 dollars in a used book store in New York City some 15 years ago and lost along the way. A riveting book that should serve as a reminder that humans are not inherently good. The book is a bit like reading Kafka's The Trial, until you realize it is not literature but a documentary.

New Pan-African Venture Fund

2008-02-28T05:58:00.000-08:00

Hasso Plattner just launched a new pan-African venture fund. Most of the venture investment I am aware of in Africa has been heavily concentrated in South Africa, though I have been hearing a lot about private equity in Nigeria from some of my African friends. Kenya was also looking like a beacon in east Africa until the recent lamentable political destabilization.

Lunar Eclipse Picture

2008-02-21T13:30:00.000-08:00

I was sitting at my computer in Redwood City worrying about the proper model for migrating composites from test to production systems when my colleagues from the integration team, Bo and Albert, called me over to Bo's office to see the lunar eclipse last evening. Pretty cool, though the eclipse was partially obscured by the cloudy weather in the Bay Area. Another friend, Deika, however, had a great view from Jamaica that she caught in a photo featured in the Telegraph. Wow!

An OSGI update

2008-02-21T08:38:00.000-08:00

Dave and Khanderao wrote up a nice summary-overview on OSGI.

Business Process Management fallacies

2008-02-19T12:50:00.000-08:00

I missed this when it first came out a couple of months ago, in case you did as well: Dubray wrote an interesting analysis of problems in BPM from conceptualization to implementation that is worth reading.

I don't agree 100% with the model for linking BPMN models to BPEL, at least not as the only normative approach to consider, but the runtime model is spot on. The only meaningful model for executable business processes is going to require composite models that incorporate more than just rote BPEL mappings: business rules, human task management, and some form of message mediation. If that sounds familiar, you've probably started to look at the Oracle AS 11 SOA suite preview....

And JJ gets why SCA is so central to getting BPM right. We had a brief conversation about this recently, which I think may make it to Infoq over the next couple of weeks.

The Next 4 Billion

2008-02-18T08:44:00.000-08:00

I recently got a copy of the joint IFC and World Resources Institute report The Next 4 Billion. I am asking my friends in the technology sector to look carefully at the issues raised by this report: specifically, how to accelerate living standards, productivity and quality of life for the world's poorest using private sector resources and market-based mechanisms. Thinking in the developed world has changed radically in only a few decades: there is a genuine consensus that developing markets aren't there to be exploited, but to be developed into first-class market economies. Many (most?) of my friends are from emerging market countries, so I am confident this will be of interest to many of you.

I am convinced that business models are not yet there, but that that they are waiting to be unlocked by creative and innovative individuals. Since the problems with business oriented models aimed at developing markets is often one of scale, a big part of the solution is likely to be technology based. This is about developing a better future for humankind. Please give it some thought.

Turning back time

2008-02-18T08:33:00.000-08:00

A really interesting paper appeared in this weeks Nature. (Unfortunately, requires a subscription to access the full paper, but you can get a copy at a local bookstore.) The authors used phylogeny based statistical techniques to reconstruct ancestral proteins for several bacteria. The results independently show (and collaborate other evidence) for paleotemperature trends from as far back as 3.5 billion years.

Phylogeny based ancestral protein sequencing is not fool-proof, but the evidence seems convergent: the seas were considerably warmer billions of years ago (30 degrees Celsius seems likely) during the early development of life.

Systems Integration 08

2008-02-14T11:42:00.000-08:00

Tracks and a call for paper have been announced for the Systems Integration 08 conference in Prague this year. This conference is extremely practical and in my experience has excellent content for IT practitioners. It is also a great opportunity to get some insight into what is happening in IT and software in central Europe, especially the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

RVC, round 2

2008-02-12T11:01:00.000-08:00

As a followup to my post on venture capital in Russia, the RVC maintains a new site, which indicates that they will soon be running a second competitive round of management company selection.

Conveniently enough, there is an RSS feed you can grab to track developments. Stay tuned.

A World of Change

2008-01-31T12:21:00.000-08:00

Jeff Mischkinsky drew my attention to this interesting article by Parag Khanna that appeared in the New York Times recently. Parag deals with the geopolitical and economic developments that are unfolding before our eyes: specifically how the world is transitioning from US-based unilateral order toward a multi-lateral world dominated not only by the US but also by China and Europe. There is much to disagree with in the details, but the central point is an important one. There is a changing reality that Americans in particular need to come to terms with quickly.

Parag talks a lot about the "second world": countries that aren't really emerging in the sense in which the term used to be used. They have in many ways arrived and they are building important alliances with the major global powers. Of continuing interest to me is the innovative thinking that is happening in these countries; thinking to which we in the US should be paying close attention.

A few examples: the recent announcement that Israel is jointly working with Shai Agassi's new organization and Renault-Nissan to move the entire country to oil-independence. And we have seen similar bold thinking before: Brazil has been steadily moving toward energy independence for some time. This is incredibly exciting stuff. Here we have small and so-called "developing" countries leading the way to the future. Brazil, by the way, is trying to tackle issues around development and income inequality by pushing very significant investments in education.

It's very hard to say what the world will be like a decade or more from now. One thing is almost certain: the world will be a smaller place; hopefully, a better one as well.

Venture Capital in Russia

2008-01-30T11:08:00.000-08:00

I spent a few hours last evening attending a panel discussion in Palo Alto on venture capital investing in Russia. The meeting was organized by the American Business Association of Russian Professionals. I was there because Russian economic development is becoming a serious area of interest and a topic on which I am doing some research work at Wharton. It took me about an hour and a half to get from Redwood Shores to Palo Alto, as 101 was shutdown the entire way at rush hour due to a major accident. The ride home was better, but 101 north was still closed most of the way.

When I finally arrived, things were just getting started. Most of the audience of about 100 spoke Russian (I do not): there was not a representative subset of the tech or finance community in the valley as a whole. I mention this because I find it odd: Russia strikes me as one of the few genuine and relatively untapped opportunities available to investors. Three factors to consider in this:

1) Russia has a very well educated population of top-notch scientists and engineers.

2) The government is dedicated to bringing private equity money and expertise into the country, developing technology businesses, and opening up investment opportunities to foreign sources (more on this later).

3)The Russian economy is growing at around 8% a year, as compared to 2-3% and slowing in the US economy. With world demand for energy continuing to grow, the economy and living standards are only going to go up.

From what I can tell from the panel, the deficits in Russia are: experienced managers, investor experience with early stage companies, and the web of specialized resources that characterize a culture of entrepreneurship. I find it hard to believe that this won’t change very rapidly.

Among the panelists were Ilya Shirokov, a young Russian Entrepreneur who shared his experiences founding the professional social networking business Moi Krug, which was acquired by the search company Yandex in 2007, and Yan Ryazantsev, Investment Director for the Russian Venture Company. The Russian Venture Company is a government fund with about 1.3 USD to invest as a limited partner in funds focused on Russian companies. My understanding of the RVC is that it will match investments in large funds with a very low required return on investment (5%). Currently, there are only two RVC backed funds. The third panelist was San Francisco VC Marc Friend, who shared his experience investing internationally, including in France, Israel, China and India.

These turn out to be useful experiences, as Russians are looking at three countries in order to learn from their successes in creating successful venture funds: China, India and Israel. There are notable differences from each of those countries: Russia’s population is an order of magnitude less than India or China and currently shrinking; Israel, though much smaller, has established a collaborative business model that is deeply linked to the US and also European markets. Russia will undoubtedly have to find its own model, but its clear they are looking at what has worked for others as a first step.

You can see the signs of change already. As of this month, the Russian laws have been updated to allow funds to use conventional capital commitments as opposed to pooling funds up front prior to investing; this was a major barrier to outside investors. Tax laws are being examined to attract investors. And there are plenty of other innovative models (the point was raised in the panel discussion that Israel and Canada match corporate R&D to stimulate investment) that could surely raise interest in Russian investment as well.

It strikes me that the biggest problem with Russia from an outside investor perspective is information asymmetry. Forget about individual deal prospecting: it’s very hard to understand what is happening in the markets as a whole. US press coverage of Russia tends to focus on either politics or Gazprom. I certainly feel I have a better handle on Israeli, Chinese and Indian markets, partially based on personal relationships, but primarily because the US business and financial press is flooded with coverage. I subscribe to feeds for several US language Russian newspapers, but I am hard pressed to understand whether I am getting accurate or biased information. It’s also unclear how to get deeply embedded in Russian business from the outside. Indeed, if you google Russia Venture Corporation, you have to go through several pages before you get a lot of solid information.

My own opinion is that all of this looks like it adds up to something special: the opportunity to participate in the start of the development of a new economic model.

Why live in the Northeast?

2008-01-28T06:07:00.000-08:00

Most of my friends find it astounding that anyone would live in the Northeastern United States: cold winters, humid summers and far from the center of technology in the US. I often find it difficult to convince them that it can be a special place. I think Cameron did a better job with a picture that speaks a thousand words.

Too bad there's been no snow in NJ...

Venture Capital and China

2008-01-27T19:22:00.000-08:00

When I was in China last year, we had a chance to talk with several private equity funds. A recent post by David Hornik gives his thoughts on PE in China.

This may be of interest to you WEMBA 33 Westers... good choice, by the way.

Oracle 11g SOA Platform Preview

2008-01-27T19:05:00.000-08:00

We recently published a preview download of the next release of our SOA platform: I'm very proud of all the hard and innovative work that our team has done on this project. The project was a real team effort from its inception. It brought together some of the brightest folks in our middleware organization. I am convinced that nothing else in the industry comes close to combining the key elements of technology required for a SOA deployment into a single, integrated platform.

We use the Service Component Architecture as the overarching model for application development: it ties together process orchestration, declarative XML transformation and routing, human workflow, business rules, and sophisticated policy management. I like to think of it as an "application server for integration": a service platform that supports domain specific languages and technologies required for integration and SOA scenarios.

Download it and try it. I think you'll be impressed.

DOA 08 Call For Papers

2008-01-24T07:43:00.000-08:00

Here is the CFP for this year's conference on Distributed Objects, Middleware, and Applications. I'd really like to see some solid papers on changing paradigms in application development and new directions for middleware systems. If you have some good ideas or interesting projects, you have until June to gel things up. The conference itself is in Monterrey Mexico, so it should also be a pleasant setting....

The 10th International Symposium on

Distributed Objects, Middleware, and Applications (DOA'08)

Monterrey, Mexico, Nov 10 - 12, 2008

http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/fedconf

Many of the world's most important and critical software systems are based on distributed object and middleware technologies. Middleware is software that resides between the applications and the underlying operating systems on every node of a distributed computing system. It provides the "glue" that connects distributed objects and applications and is at the heart of component-based systems, service-oriented architectures, agent-based systems, or peer-to-peer infrastructures.

Distribution technologies have reached a high level of maturity. Classical distributed object middleware (e.g., CORBA, .NET and Java-based technologies) and message-oriented middleware (e.g., publish/subscribe systems) have been widely successful. We are now witnessing a shift to coarser-grained component-based and service-oriented architectures (e.g., Web services). Middleware for mobile applications and peer-to-peer systems (e.g., JXTA) is also gaining increasing popularity, as it allows bridging users without reliance on centralized resources.

Common to all these approaches are goals such as openness, reliability, scalability, awareness, distribution transparency, security, ease of development, or support for heterogeneity between applications and platforms. Also, of utmost importance today is the ability to integrate distributed services and applications with other technologies such as the Web, multimedia systems, databases, peer-to-peer systems, or Grids. Along with the rapid evolution of these fields, continuous research and development is required in distributed technologies to advance the state of the art and broaden the scope of their applicability

Two Dimensions: Research & Practice

Research in distributed objects, components, services, and middleware establishes new principles that open the way to solutions that can meet the requirements of tomorrow's applications. Conversely, practical experience in real-world projects drives this same research by exposing new ideas and unveiling new types of problems to be solved. DOA explicitly intends to provide a forum to help trigger and foster this mutual interaction. Submissions are therefore welcomed along both these dimensions: research (fundamentals, concepts, principles, evaluations, patterns, and algorithms) and practice (applications, experience, case studies, and lessons). Contributions attempting to bridge the gap between these two dimensions are particularly encouraged. As we are fully aware of the differences between academic and industrial research and development, submissions will be treated accordingly and judged by a peer review not only for scientific rigor (in the case of "academic research" papers), but also for originality and relevance (in the case of "case study" papers).

About DOA

DOA 2008 is part of a joint event on the theme "meaningful Internet systems and ubiquitous computing". This federated event co-locates five related and complementary conferences in the areas of networked information systems, covering key issues in distributed infrastructures and enabling technologies (DOA), data and Web semantics (ODBASE), cooperative information systems (CoopIS), Grid computing (GADA) and Information Security (ISS). More details about this federated event can be found at http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/fedconf .

TOPICS OF INTEREST

The topics of this symposium include, but are not limited to:

* Application case studies of distribution technologies
* Aspect-oriented approaches for distributed middleware
* Component-based distributed systems
* Content distribution and multimedia streaming
* Dependency injection
* Development methodologies for distributed applications
* Distributed algorithms and communication protocols
* Distributed business objects and components
* Distributed databases and transactional systems
* Distributed infrastructures for cluster and Grid computing
* Distributed middleware for embedded systems and sensor networks
* Formal methods and tools for designing, verifying, and evaluating distributed middleware
* Interoperability with other technologies
* Microcontainers
* Middleware for mobile and ad-hoc networks
* Migration of legacy applications to distributed architectures
* Novel paradigms to support distribution
* Object-based, component-based, and service-oriented middleware
* Peer-to-peer and decentralized infrastructures
* Performance analysis of distributed computing systems
* Publish/subscribe, event-based, and message-oriented middleware
* Reliability, fault tolerance, quality-of-service, and real time support
* Scalability and adaptivity of distributed architectures
* Self-* properties in distributed middleware
* Service-oriented architectures
* Software engineering for distributed middleware systems
* Testing and validation of distributed infrastructures
* Ubiquitous and pervasive computing
* Web services

IMPORTANT DATES

Abstract Submission Deadline June 8, 2008
Paper Submission Deadline June 15, 2008
Acceptance Notification August 10, 2008
Camera Ready Due August 25, 2008
Registration Due August 25, 2008
OTM Conferences November 9 - 14, 2008

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Papers submitted to DOA'08 must not have been accepted for publication elsewhere or be under review for another workshop or conference.

All submitted papers will be carefully evaluated based on originality, significance, technical soundness, and clarity of expression. All papers will be refereed by at least three members of the program committee, and at least two will be experts from industry in the case of practice reports. All submissions must be in English.

Submissions must not exceed 18 pages in the final camera-ready paper style.

The paper submission site will be announced later
Failure to comply with the formatting instructions for submitted papers will lead to the outright rejection of the paper without review.

Failure to commit to presentation at the conference automatically excludes a paper from the proceedings.

ORGANISATION COMMITTEE

OTM'08 General Co-Chairs

* Robert Meersman, VU Brussels, Belgium
* Zahir Tari, RMIT University, Australia

DOA'08 Program Committee Co-Chairs

* Mark Little, Red Hat, UK
* Alberto Montressor, University of Trento, Italy
* Greg Pavlik, Oracle, USA

Program Committee Members

* Santosh Shrivastava, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
* Nick Kavantzas, Oracle, USA
* Stuart Wheater, Arjuna Technologies
* Aniruddha S. Gokhale, Vanderbilt University
* Michel Riveill, Université de Nice, Sophia Antipolis – France
* Gero Mühl, Berlin University of Technology, Germany
* Fernando Pedone, University of Lugano, Switzerland
* Graham Morgan, Newcastle University, UK
* Barret Bryant, University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA
* Michael Stal, Siemens, Germany
* Jose Orlando Pereira, University of Minho
* Luis Rodrigues, INESC-ID/IST
* Francois Pacull, Xerox Research Centre Europe
* Aad van Moorsel, University of Newcastle, UK
* Gordon Blair, Lancaster University, UK
* Pascal Felber, Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland
* Joe Loyall, BBN Technologies, USA
* Mark Baker, Coactus Consulting, Canada
* Rui Oliveira, University of Minho, Portugal
* Harold Carr, Sun, USA
* Fabio Kon, University of São Paulo, Brazil
* Judith Bishop, University of Pretoria, SOUTH AFRICA
* Arno Puder, San Francisco State University, USA
* Shalini Yajnik, Avaya Labs, USA
* Benoit Garbinato, University of Lausanne, Switzerland
* Calton Pu, Georgia Tech, USA
* Geoff Coulson, Lancaster University, UK
* Hong Va Leong, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong
* Nikola Milanovic, Technical University Berlin
* Jean-Bernard Stefani, INRIA, France
* Andrew Watson, OMG, USA
* Gregory Chockler, IBM Haifa Labs, Israel
* Gian Pietro Picco, University of Trento, Italy
* Patrick Eugster, Purdue University, USA
* Eric Jul, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
* Jeff Gray, University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA
* Medhi Jazayeri, University of Lugano, Switzerland
* Richard Solely, OMG, USA

Spring Framework continues to accelerate

2008-01-24T06:21:00.000-08:00

Something very interesting has happened, as noted by Rod Johnson: Spring framework skills are now in higher demand for Java developers than EJB skills. One implication is that the model for Java development has shifted to Java developers and away from standards bodies. For a long time now, we've seen standards bodies serve as collaboration or even research facilities for new programming models: while this has created new markets (J(2)EE, for example), it has also meant that many standards are being built by standards folks cooking up elaborate models, rather than building common standards based on proven models.

I wonder if this will serve as a wake up call and help change how the software industry develops standards? Or will we ignore this signal at our own risk?

DOA 08

2008-01-20T13:38:00.000-08:00

I'll be working as a co-chair for the Distributed Objects, Middleware and Applications conference, which is part of the federated On The Move technical conferences that are held every year. Look for the Call for Papers in the coming days.

The conference itself will be held in November in Monterrey, Mexico, which may be an added incentive to submit a paper this year.

More details to follow...

Infoq picked up transaction discussion

2008-01-15T11:31:00.000-08:00

JJ Dubray picked up the discussion Mark and I had bouncing back and forth between blogs.

And, yes, I owe a comment update to Mark.

Predictions 2008

2007-12-31T10:53:00.000-08:00

Here are a few random predictions for 2008, most of which seem obvious. I won't be offended if you tell me I'm crazy.

1) Amazon music downloads will explode, causing Apple to re-evaluate both DRM and pricing on iTunes.

2) E-books will not take off this year.

3) Social networking spam will become unbearable, as tons of venture backed sites and technologies appear. Most will fail by the end of 2009.

4) The Wall Street Journal will becoming increasingly and inexplicably biased toward China and against Russia.

5) SOA hype will die down and real case studies dealing with large scale, enterprise deployments will show how this is an evolutionary technology that has passed the hype curve and is seeing real (and early) adoption.

6) There will be no widespread use of extended transaction models in large scale systems. (That one is for Mark!).

Transaction Models, Again

2007-12-29T14:31:00.000-08:00

Unfortunately, blogs can sometimes lose the nice nested associations of discussions that characterized Usenet, but they remain an interesting and more accessible way to debate ideas. Mark replied back with a reply to my previous comment on transaction futures with a clarification. What I meant to say was that I more or less explicitly disagree with the position as he's clarified it: after looking at attempts to reconcile multi-party choreographies and efforts around BTP, I have come to believe that large scale systems that require a global coordinator are destined to fail. The future belongs to a different paradigm, where bilateral negotiation and local enforcement of "system" invariants are likely to be building blocks for successful applications. I am confident that infrastructure and frameworks will play an in important role, but in this case, I am inclined to paraphrase Nietzsche: "The Coordinator is dead!"

New York state of mind

2007-12-29T13:52:00.000-08:00

New York has always been one of my favorite states: between the upstate wilderness and open space and New York City, it's difficult to find anywhere else in the US that has so much to offer in such close proximity. I had the chance after Christmas to spend a few days in New York, which reinforces my opinion that it remains one of the greatest cities in the world.

Regardless of your religious affiliation, Christmas in New York is something to experience. Here's the lit tree at Rockefeller Center:

And a tree entirely decorated with origami in the American Museum of Natural History:

And here's Radio City Music Hall celebrating its 75th anniversary:

It's hard to spend time there and not get swept away by the energy, commerce and diversity in Manhattan. I'd move there, but it strikes me as too expensive for the average person.

I wanted to recommend two things to fill a day if you are visiting Manhattan anytime soon. The first is a place to spend the day and the second, a place to have dinner. Plan at least one full day, preferably two, to spend in the American Museum of Natural History on West Central Park. I have never been to a better science museum, period. The exhibits are large enough to require a good deal of time to explore. The layouts are fantastic and the explanatory notes in each exhibit are accessible, yet not dumbed down. They do an excellent job of showing the interrelationships between animal taxonomies.

We spent most of the day and were only able to explore parts of two floors (of four) and never got to see any of the planetarium. Incidentally, they are running an Imax film called Dinosaurs Alive, narrated by Michael Douglas, that is worth seeing, especially with kids.

Here's a fossilized mammoth skeleton from the exhibit featuring mammalian fossils:

And here is a (crowded) photo of Lucy, the famous example of our ancestor australopithecus:

Here's a quick photo of a cast of archaeopteryx that I took (I've always been fascinated by this early link that shows the origin of bird species from their dinosaur ancestors):

All the other photos are by my wife. The guy with the good looking head that reappears in a couple of the pictures is me.

Lastly, I wanted to recommend the restaurant Russian Samovar in midtown, which was recommended to me by a friend that moved to New York from Russia. Most of the customers were Russian and we were greeted with the assumption we were as well (my wife is not). We enjoyed a great meal: the food is not extraordinarily fancy, just authentic.

Happy Holidays and Best Wishes for the Coming Year

2007-12-24T08:12:00.000-08:00

Belatedly, I wanted to wish all my friends a happy holiday season. I hope you find peace and prosperity in the year ahead.

Alternate transaction models

2007-12-10T06:37:00.000-08:00

My friend and sometimes co-author/editor Mark Little has a new post talking about recent work in extended transactions, by which he means transactions that relax the strict ACID requirements of traditional transaction management (of course, these are never really ACID to begin with, but it's a useful fiction that we can live with). In fact, our transaction book reviews different transaction models that helped inform the work on more general frameworks including the work in the OMG Activity Service and WS-CAF, as Mark notes.

For a long time, I thought that extended transactions would be very important. Actually, I thought they would be in wide use by now. In 2001, I was very interested to see what would become of BTP; the answer, at this point, is some very interesting additions to the literature and a few failed attempts at commercialization. The devil was in the details: with BTP, the application may subsume the role of the coordinator at which point it becomes less and less clear why the protocol is needed at all above and beyond the business logic itself. This led us to focus more on choreographies, with the notion of defining the business protocols through some formal structure that may or may not be automated by "transactional" infrastructure. The experience in recent years has led me to believe that transactions may be the wrong paradigm altogether for broadly distributed systems. The trouble is, we don't know what the right paradigm is yet.

Mark notes a recent paper by Pat Helland as an important read. I agree, but my conclusion is also increasingly heterodox with respect to the transactions community: that is, Pat's paper should be taken at face value to be about writing application logic. There are patterns here that need to be understood by application developers. Perhaps supported by frameworks. But it may simply be that transaction management won't play a broad role in that context.

iTunes as Content Repository

2007-12-10T06:15:00.000-08:00

iTunes is one of these e-commerce systems, that, rather like Amazon.com, stands to become something more than an online retailer. A first glance suggests an aging and less-than-graceful application. The iTunes Store pop music motif looks like a kind of marketing-driven testament to bad taste. But under the covers, there is something else happening that suggests a permanent future for the service and its likelihood of growing importance. A few things to note:

1) The music library is growing extremely broad to include a full range of music that is hard if not impossible to find on CD. These include important Jazz musicians, especially classic works from the 20s, 30s and 40s, a very broad range of classical compositions, and international music that has a lower appeal in the US. I was surprised to find several versions of Charles Mingus's Tijuana Moods, including a recent re-release. If only the application got more attention in design to better automatically customize to a users profile and some help on navigation....

2) iTunes user comments continue to grow: it looks like Amazon may lose out in importance for album reviews. This is important, as it means that iTunes may be the first stop to find out about newer music.

3) The free content is growing, with podcasts available from many sources on almost any subject under the sun. This could be a daily draw for users from all over the world if the content was more openly accessible.

4) As a channel for Audible.com, it is now the premiere source of what spoken-word digital books.

5) Lastly, I highly recommend checking out iTunes U. There are a (still small) number of lectures from top tier universities, including UC Berkeley, University of Pennsylvania, and others. Seriously, there is not anywhere else I can find that offers relatively in depth lectures on topics from Heidegger's Being and Time to Greek classical literature.

Let's see where things wind up in the next three years. Seems that iTunes may be stumbling into a transition from the trivial to the important.

Some uncertainty resolved

2007-12-10T06:07:00.000-08:00

I've been following event in two areas with interest: the credit melt-down in the financial services space and the uncertainty around Putin's succession plans in Russia. Looks like the latter is resolved with the selection of Dmitri Medvedev, a respected figure in Russia to be sure. Now let's see if the credit market mess will get some resolution soon!

Social Networking Data

2007-11-29T10:58:00.000-08:00

I've been looking at the various social networking technologies, and I've been intrigued by the degree to which they focus on sharing information that seems like there is no conceivable reason to share. Example: I'm listening to "X" or I just bought "Y". In other cases, I can see real privacy concerns being an issue. Then I realized how much of this stuff I was actually making notes about and even googled around a bit for information on music artists that I hadn't heard of.

I've been listening to music most of the work day in the background and fortunately the iPod is able to tell me exactly what I've been listening to. In the spirit of the times, I'll share. So the three most listened to albums are:

1) Anna Netrebko's Russian Album.

Netrebko's voice has been described as dark, but it seems perfect to me in this album. I also have her doing Aria's from La Traviata with Rolando Villazon, but I much prefer this album, in general and day to day.

2) Wynton Marsalis's Black Codes (From Underground)

Marsalis remains one of my favorite musicians and an indispensable part of my daily life, despite my overall lack of enthusiasm for the latest and somewhat dreary From the Plantation to the Penitentiary album. Black Codes is a classic from an amazing and creative talent.

3) Helene Grimaud's Beethoven: Piano Concertos

Stunning. This album will take you to another place.

Not sure what is to be done with this information, but it's a minor contribution to the personalization of the web.

Good Reads

2007-11-28T11:32:00.000-08:00

A few books I've snuck in over the last month, all of which I'd recommend:

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee: there is a reason that Coetzee received the Nobel Prize in literature, epitomized by this book, which is both extraordinarily difficult to read and almost impossible to put down. The book deals with complicated topics in such sparse text, that it seems like the literary equivalent of a spring trap: an ugly thing designed as a masterful piece of craftsmanship that traps the reader in a painful grasp. Far and away the best book I've read this year.

The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins: ever since the Selfish Gene, a really great book, Dawkins has been an indispensable popularizer of evolutionary theory. The Blind Watchmaker is quite good, piggybacking off the deist conception of life as the bi-product of a designer (where have we heard this recently?), to illustrate how evolutionary processes actually work. The most striking point by reference to the popular imagination is this: there is no point, or more properly, no fixed design. Infinitely better than the cringe-worthy God Delusion, this is a book that really ought to be required reading for high school students taking biology courses.

Corporate Finance: A Valuation Approach by Simon Benninga and Oded Sarig: ok, I confess, I had to read this book for a class, and the class was given by the authors. I probably would not have read this otherwise. (An interesting aside: both professors commute from Israel to Philadelphia to teach. I thought I had a bad commute!) However, I have done a series of courses on corporate finance touching on the topic of valuation and have read several books on valuation. This book continually gave me new insights into how to approach valuation problems, which, as I've noted, are a persistent challenge for entrepreneurs and software startups. The book is worth reading on its own, or at least worth knowing someone who has read it.

Moorestown Running Company

2007-11-07T11:26:00.000-08:00

In the software business many people know Bob Bickel, who helped build up Bluestone Software through an IPO and sale to HP. After that, he ran HP's middleware business and then went on to build out JBoss (the company), which he in turn helped sell off to Red Hat. Pretty amazing guy.

I've had several people ask what Bob's up to these days. I had a chance to stop by his latest venture, the Moorestown Running Company. The store specializes in running gear and does a full fitting program to get runners paired up with the right shoes. Turns out that I am suffering from some moderate to serious pronation, and the folks at MRC were able to get me fitted with shoes with extra support. They feel great and I feel like I've lost another excuse not to exercise.

Moorestown is the tech center of the east coast (we like to think so anyway), stop by for a pair of sneakers on your next visit to the area.

Selling your IT Business

2007-11-07T10:18:00.000-08:00

Like many people in software, I have cycled between large, established companies and startup opportunities. In recent years, I've focused more on large scale projects in bigger companies, but I've always tried to stay in tune with what's happening in the startup world. My interest in managing young software businesses was sharpened when I co-founded a company, which as ultimately unsuccessful, at the bottom of the dot.com crash. The thing I realized then was that I really did not understand much about valuations and financial measures. Over time, I've found that many other entrepreneurs struggle with these issues, so my first piece of advice to early stage companies that are looking to sell or raise capital is always: make sure you get a good finance person to help you. It can be hard to get a CFO involved at a very early stage, so this may have to be a board member with some knowledge of finance. Any capital of quality will have a huge advantage over the entrepreneur in this area, so this is one of the most important areas to manage, since it impacts the value entrepreneurs will realize from their venture. (Ironically, finance has changed for me from something of a weakness to an area in which I am much more comfortable, but this took a lot of time and pain.)

Anyway, there's a book I want to recommend for entrepreneurs that I just finished reading: Bob Chalfin's Selling Your IT Business. This is a very readable, easy to understand guide to the many of the legal issues involved with doing a business, including valuations. I don't think it can be a replacement for assistance, but it's a great overview for anyone thinking about selling a smaller business and wants to understand many of the core issues involved in the process. I know Bob from an investment project I've been involved with, so I can also say that he lives this stuff.

The Master and Margarita

2007-11-05T12:26:00.000-08:00

As many of my friends know, I am a huge fan of Russian literature. Though I do not speak Russian (aside from a few holiday greetings I picked up as a kid), there's something intangible about Russian novels that I cannot find in any other national literary tradition that persists through translation. Perhaps it is the modernity of Russia's literary golden age or perhaps it is purely a personal bias brought on by my youthful recollections of exported Russian culture. Whatever the case, I still respond strongly to the works of Gogol and Dostoevsky, even on multiple readings.

I have not had a lot of time to read books for pleasure recently, but I did have a chance to revisit Bulgakov. The Burgin/O'Connor translation of The Master and Margarita is entrancing. Within the first few chapters, I found myself unable to put the book down: the first description of Pilate's trial of Yeshua is irresistible. I read one complaint on-line on the translation, but it reads wonderfully and is supposed to be quite true to the original. Definitely recommended.

Check out new links

2007-10-24T12:36:00.000-07:00

I've started to add some more links of interest: specifically, to friends who have been doing innovative things in the field of applied distributed computing or internet services. This is not meant to be exhaustive nor to point out all the blogs I look at: you should use feeddo to keep up on that kind of thing (if you aren't using feeddo, you really should be). I've added Cameron, Hal, Rod, Mark and Edwin K. recently. If you don't recognize the first names, they are all worth getting to know.

New England Fall

2007-10-24T11:52:00.000-07:00

Cameron got it (almost) 100% right: New England in the fall is for a time the most glorious place on the planet. What he missed: the great traditions of chasing pa'tridge and timberdoodle starting in October, which are the only appropriate source of loud noise generation I can think of for this time and place...

Some of my happiest memories are of hidden coverts surrounded by stone walls near abandoned homesteads and the crisp fall air in the northeast. It just doesn't get any better than that.

iPhone opens up

2007-10-17T11:34:00.000-07:00

This is a great move, turning the iTouch from a closed marketing platform into a portable, internet-centric computing system.

Personal Inspirations

2007-09-27T09:06:00.000-07:00

If you haven't already seen it, take a few minutes to look at Carnegie Mellon computer science professor's now famous "last lecture." Here's a man that is leaving life with elegance, courage and a sense of purpose. It's in the lives of "ordinary", extraordinary people that I'm finding the biggest sources of inspiration these days.

Another example: a friend of mine left a Wall Street position for military service after 9/11 because he thought it was the right thing to do. He completed his service and at the same time set up a charity called "Give to the World", which uses US troops to get basic supplies in to war torn areas where humanitarian organizations are unable to reach. This is worth checking out as well. My favorite quote from one of the founders is this: "Someone once said to me, 'you can’t save the world.' Hopefully one day, no one will ever believe a word of it."

Hong Kong

2007-09-24T01:55:00.000-07:00

A semi-sovereign state now administered by the Chinese government, Hong Kong gives the appearance of an entirely different country from China itself: Chinese by ethnicity and culture, to be sure, but very different from the mainland. The city will be more familiar to westerners, though I would not describe it as western per se. This is a truely international city. While I was there, I saw plenty of British, Japanese, some Americans, French, Indians, and of course the majority Chinese population. The city is lit by neon and dominated by tall buildings, both offices and apartments with awesome views.

This is a mature economy. Sometimes Hong Kong is more reminiscent of parts of Tokyo, than Shanghai. Hong Kong continues to seek immigrants "of quality", which I take to mean professionals. The residents are clearly wealthy by world standards or in fact by American or European standards. The main economic driver is in finance, though retail and shipping are visible as well. A night time cab ride wound up behind two different Ferraris in 20 minutes. Hong Kong is certainly suggestive of the level of economic development that major Chinese cities will reach in time.

Hong Kong, of course, maintains it's own financial system (though currency is issued by private banks: my Hong Kong dollars were issued by HSBC). The Hong Kong stock market is highly successful. In fact, Hong Kong seems to be almost a pure capitalist system. Like the Chinese cities I visited, Hong Kong felt utterly safe. It also seems like a very attractive place to live and work. I can't think of a better location for sampling authentic foods from around the world, night after night.

Beijing

2007-09-19T19:28:00.000-07:00

A note from the seat of the central government. Beijing is more interesting from a tourist perspective than Shanghai, though I have only been able to see things from a taxi en route to meetings. The buildings in Beijing are different: the layout is typically large and low, with buildings occupying a whole city block. The city has a feel of strong growth as well, but more planned and orderly. The feeling is less international and more distinctly Chinese. The air in Beijing was decidedly cleaner than Shanghai.

Private business is everywhere, but so are government offices. The government employees I met were extraordinarily smart, serious, but also very friendly. I saw little difference in form or function from what you might expect in the US. The more I travel, the more I learn that despite our differences, people everywhere are people: same basic concerns, same basic desires, not always the same perspectives on everything.

The food in China is amazing. Two evenings ago, I had traditional peking duck from a hickory wood fired oven. Most of the food I've had has been delicious, but the duck was just awesome.

As you drive by Tiananmen Square, you can see the new opera house, which is set to open shortly. Opposite the square is the smiling portrait of a benevolent looking Chairman Mao. The city is also a city of contrasts: as you drive past Mao, you also drive past a mini-Rodeo drive, replete with shops for Swiss watch brands that routinely sell for over 20,000 USD. Another striking statement on how much things have changed here.

The red government buildings are another study in how things have changed: does the red represent communism or prosperity and good fortune? Both or neither?

I write from Hong Kong, now administered by the Chinese government, yet under a completely different system. I have talked with Hong Kong natives who describe the arrangement as a family reunion, where earlier concerns have largely been put to rest. Again, not what I might have expected as an outsider and the different systems are another interesting contrast in China.

The excitement over the olympics is infectious. I picked up some souvenirs for the 2008 games at the airport. I have never traveled to the olympics before, but being in Beijing during the games may be worth the effort.

Shanghai

2007-09-14T19:45:00.000-07:00

I just wrapped up a week long business tour in Shanghai, where I had the opportunity to meet with executives at MNCs doing business in China. Fantastic experience and I'll try to share some thoughts on this in a follow-up note. Just a few quick observations now.

It's difficult to describe the explosive growth and the level of investment that is happening here: I have not personally experienced anything comparable.

I did not know what to expect when I came here and my number one takeaway from the trip is this: you have to come to China to begin to understand what it is like here and to have any clue about what is happening here. I can say frankly that reading the western press does not prepare you for the experience at all.

The Chinese people are open and frank, as are westerners living here. The presence of European shops and the ubiquity of American and European brands was surprising. Retail business is huge here, and families appear to be always out and always shopping. Prices vary dramatically, depending on where you shop. A full dinner (and a couple of beers) at a popular Shanghainese restaurant topped out at 6 USD. On the other hand, a tall cup of Starbucks coffee was nearly 4 USD! There is clearly wealth asymmetry. Workers live in small and old apartments. On the other hand, nice Western style apartments appear to cost on par with Manhattan.

When you talk to the Chinese about how the country is governed, they talk about understanding the Chinese government in terms of Confucius, not communism. The people are fiercely proud of the success here and the middle class and business class seems very supportive of the government. I got no sense that this was anything but honest: in fact, Chinese were also quite willing to make critical comments on specific issues and openly acknowledge problems they face.

The best and brightest are said to go into government here. One executive compared the party education as on par with top MBA programs worldwide and emphasized that the leaders are thoroughly schooled in liberal economics.

There is a very strong entrepreneurial spirit here. I have talked with small business owners as well, some of whom fled China, then Hong Kong, only to return to live in Shanghai.

An amazing place. And I think it's fair to say that this is only the start of China's resurgence.